The promise of invisibility - Technology and the City
http://editors.cis-india.org
A seven month research project initiated by Nishant Shah (Director-Research; CIS) , in collaboration with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Shanghai University, enabled by a grant from the Asia Scholarship Foundation, Bangkok.
daily12011-08-10T11:20:18ZThe Making of an Asian City
http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/finalpaper
<b>Nishant Shah attended the conference on 'Pluralism in Asia: Asserting Transnational Identities, Politics, and Perspectives' organised by the Asia Scholarship Foundation, in Bangkok, where he presented the final paper based on his work in Shanghai. The paper, titled 'The Making of an Asian City', consolidates the different case studies and stories collected in this blog, in order to make a larger analyses about questions of cultural production, political interventions and the invisible processes that are a part of the IT Cities. </b>
<p></p>
<p align="center" style="text-align: center;"> <strong>The
Promise of Invisibility: The Making of an Asian IT City</strong></p>
<p><strong>Abstract:</strong>
This paper understands that in emerging Asian contexts, the proliferation and adoption
of Internet technologies leads to two distinct changes in the material
(re)construction of the city:</p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst">1. <em>Built Form of the City:</em>
The physical and material aspects of the city are restructured, redesigned and
realigned to house the infrastructure of Internet Technology economies. </p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast">2. <em>Governance and Administration</em>:
The technologies of governance (and also, the governance of technologies) that reconfigure
the city for better control, regulation and containment of the subjects of the
state.</p>
<p>These
changes are articulated and understood, in contemporary scholarship and discourse,
through the tropes of Access and Transparency, which propose Technology as
neutral. These studies also locate technology as outside of the changing
socio-political transformations that the city undergoes in its attempt to
emerge as an IT City. The framework, by contextualising technology differently
– in larger narratives of continuity and disruption – opens up a dialogue
between cybercultures and social sciences to look at conditions of change It
also shows how the It demonstrates how such an approach to technology studies
enables new and nuanced forms of social sciences inquiry into processes like
Dislocation and Migration, which have never addressed the technology question
as central to the phenomena.</p>
<p><strong>Context</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The 21<sup>st</sup> Century has seen accelerated
urbanisation and spatial restructuration of cities in emerging information
societies around the world. These cities are created as global hubs that shall
not only house the Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
infrastructure, but also embody the aesthetics, politics, practices and
lifestyles that the global cultural revolutions are bringing in. The
technologies are significantly involved in the production of the dominant, the
hegemonic and the coercive, all under the rubric of economic growth and development,
and have affected domains of life, labour and language (Foucault,1998) in
different contexts. It is easy to trace the ways in which lifestyle, cultural
expression (Bagga, 2005), texture of social interaction and mobilisation, and
political and administrative reorganisation (Roy, 2005) have changed in
emerging contexts like India and China.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The efforts at creating
‘global countries’ (Kalam, 2004) that can harness the powers of ICT, have lead
to three distinct forms of changes. These changes can be seen in the built form
of the city, in structures of governance and administration, and in attitudes
and Imagination of technologies as they emerge in popular discourse and
cultural production. Each of these changes is articulated and explained through
the tropes of Transparency and Access. The paper has a specific interest in
looking at sites of dislocation and migration, to illustrate the arguments it
seeks to make. The paper relies on secondary and tertiary literature (often in
translation), unstructured interviews and participant observation to make an
argument about how the aesthetics, mechanics and political <a name="_ednref1" href="#_edn1"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[i]</span></span></a>
imaginaries of technology are a part of the physically changing and
transforming IT cities in Asia. In order to make the argument, however, a brief
context that explains the material signification of these three kinds of
changes, is necessary to be explicated.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em>Beyond the Blogosphere</em></strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">There has been an equal amount of optimism and
scepticism when it comes to talking about the new public spheres that emerge
with the Internet. Clubbed under the short-hand ‘Blogosphere’, both the
evangelists and the critics of the blogosphere, have explored the Habermassian
notion of the engaging public that is crafted with the emergence of new
technologies of literacy, expression and participation. In many ways, the
governance structures that have been discussed earlier, also endorse the
positions taken by these interlocutors. However, much of the discourse,
understands the blogosphere as contained in the digital domains. While a
cause-and-effect model is often posited, the chief interest and focus remains
on the new public, new voices and new spaces within the virtualities of the
World Wide Web. This paper challenges such narrow definitions of the public
sphere, and in fact, goes back to Habermass to locate technologies and public
spaces within a certain historical context. In fact, this paper proposes that
the increasing need for the faith in the blogosphere and the clamour that
surrounds it is symptomatic of how the physical and built public spaces, in
most Asian IT cities, is slowly diminishing.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">In Shanghai, it is the loss of a political public
space of socialist capital and industry that marks the beginning of this
disappearance. 20 years ago, the announcer on every passenger train entering
Shanghai would introduce the city as “the largest industrial city in China.”
When W. E. B. Du Bois, an African-American writer, visited Shanghai in 1959, he
was particularly invited to visit the balcony of Shanghai Mansion, which sits
at the mouth of the Suzhou River and was the tallest building of its time, to
catch a bird’s eye view of the new urban socialist landscape and the
innumerable factory chimneys that speared the sky (Zhang, 2002).<a name="_ednref2" href="#_edn2"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[ii]</span></span></a> Indeed,
an abundant number of factories, warehouses and dockyards cropped up in the
three decades after 1950, and, together with the existing industrial
constructions, made Shanghai a “new metropolis.” Some of them were clustered in
suburban areas, more were scattered in the city area. Some were even squeezed
into <em>Longtangs</em> (the narrow alleyways
of old Shanghai). The industrial constructions include not only factory
buildings but also workers’ residential buildings in factory-concentrated
areas. The workers’ residential buildings were targeted primarily at the senior
or skilled workers among the industrial population. Life in the residential
buildings became an extension of factory life since neighbours were most
probably co-workers in the same factory. It is precisely the great number of
old and new industrial constructions and the rhythmic life going on in them
that composed the socialist industrial space of Shanghai. Needless to say, it
was the fastest growing space in the forty years after 1949.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">However, nine out of ten such spaces have been wiped
out during the fifteen-year urban renewal project, which is perhaps embodied in
the restructuring of the Bund as a space of tourist attraction, and eventually
the building of the Pudong skyline that has now become the iconic face of the
city (Yatsko, 1996, pp 59).<a name="_ednref3" href="#_edn3"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[iii]</span></span></a>
Factories—let alone warehouses—within the Inner Ring Road have either closed
down or been removed. With the closing of the factories, the workers also have
no place to work anymore. Dr. Wang XiaoMing, in his essay on the changing
public space mentions how, once the factory he worked in “had its signboard
removed in 1997, the workers have no place to work anymore. The inhabitants of
Caoyang New Village have thrown away the signboard off the gate a long time ago
and could barely remember that the place was once called the “Workers New
Village.” Large factories located on the outskirts of the city are mostly shut
down and the places are as quiet as cemeteries” (forthcoming, 2010).</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">As Americanised industrial parks sprout up in places
such as the Pudong District of Shanghai, and Kunshan and Suzhou to the north of
Shanghai, the socialist industrial space is shrinking rapidly both within and
without Shanghai. Another space that has significantly diminished is the public
political space. One of the most important requirements socialism places on
urban space is to be able to facilitate large-scale political rallies and
parades (Kewen 2006 and Liang 1959).<a name="_ednref4" href="#_edn4"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[iv]</span></span></a></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Therefore, apart from industrial constructions, the
most eye-catching constructions in Shanghai’s new urban constructions from the
1950s to the 1960s were squares and large meeting halls, which include the People’s
Square, the Sino-Russian Friendship Building, the Cultural Plaza, and so on.<a name="_ednref5" href="#_edn5"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[v]</span></span></a>
Moreover, government agencies of all levels and factories endeavoured to build
conference halls of various sizes for political meetings by transforming
theatre halls or building new ones. In the past, tens of thousands of people
have paraded down the People’s Square to pay tribute to the officials perched
high above on reviewing stands. People rallying in various meeting halls,
changing slogans to express joy, and echoing the instructions from the speakers
on stage, were frequent occurrences. During the Cultural Revolution, the Rebels
staged the final resistance here; in the late 1980s, fervent university
students had swarmed into People’s Square to turn it into a place of revelry (Feuchtwang,
2004).</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">In the blink of an eye, these histories have faded
from the public memory and been completely erased from the city’s architectural
space. Sino-Russia Friendship Building is renamed Shanghai Exhibition Center,
which hosts a constant blur of Expos. After repeated segmentation, People’s
Square is now only a nominal square with a long and narrow driveway and most of
its space has been occupied by new buildings such as the majestic Shanghai
Grand Theatre, the Shanghai Museum, the sunken commercial street and a parking
lot. Cultural Plaza was first transformed into a large flower market which was
later torn down and pushed to a corner to make way for the new “Music Plaza.”
With mass meetings completely eradicated from the life of Shanghai’s residents,
the numerous assembly halls and meeting places of various sizes have naturally
been restructures for other purposes. People participate with zeal in large
assemblies such as concerts, performance competitions, and so on, which have nothing
to do with public politics. It is even possible to say that the audience’s
shrieks in the stadium symbolize the massive decrease of the public political
space in both architectural and spiritual sense (Tang, 2009, pp 327).</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Another cluster of spaces that have significantly
disappeared are the gossip centres concentrated in areas such as the mouth of
NongTang, Lao Hu Zhao <a name="_ednref6" href="#_edn6"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[vi]</span></span></a>,
variety store and lane. It is a cultural given that the Shanghainese like to
strike up a conversation with strangers and to engage in gossip; this is indeed
one of the city’s hallmarks. The Shanghainese can always spare time for gossip:
no matter how busy the atmosphere is, there are always some people who loiter
around with hands in pockets; even the working class who work from dawn to dusk
like to exchange a few words with their neighbours after work. It so happened
that the living space was very cramped for the Shanghainese after the 1950s.<a name="_ednref7" href="#_edn7"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[vii]</span></span></a> The
rich can idle away their time in places such as cinemas whereas the low-income
people can only manage to find a free space of leisure near their residences.
The first choice is the mouth of NongTang adjacent to the footpath, from which
all the comings and goings of residents and the traffics on the streets could
be perceived. There will always be a Lao Hu Zhao near the mouth of a big
NongTang, where you can sit for a whole afternoon and exchange hearsays with
neighbours coming for hot water over a cup of tea; or there is a family-run
variety store whose female boss is quite fond of trading rumours and gossip
with customers across the narrow counter. In times of local or national crises,
this is always the first place where the news is spread and gets distorted.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Things have now changed. Lao Huo Zhaos are gone.
Variety stores are quickly replaced by different kinds of convenience stores
(Huang, 2004, pp 49-50). Although many similar or even smaller family-run
variety stores are opened at the newly-formed district bordering the city, a
stable communication space cannot form in these stores since the male or female
boss is mostly “non-native population”<a name="_ednref8" href="#_edn8"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[viii]</span></span></a>, who
not only is unable to blend in with the local residents but also may move away
at any time. Although being one of the hallmarks of old Shanghai houses, the
nongtangs have been pulled down in large numbers. Those narrow, winding streets
have been either diverted, or straightened and widened. Shabby houses on both
sides of the streets have disappeared. Also gone are the hustle and bustle, the
interfusion of public and private space, and street gossips, which have been
replaced by heavy traffic with exhaust gas and noise. With the increasingly
neat arrangement of construction space within the city, the influx of transient
population, residents increasingly accustomed to shutting doors to the world and
to their neighbours, the overwhelming clamour in the media, and the young
people’s addiction to internet and game bars, the space where rumours and
gossips are spread via mouths and pointing fingers is naturally contracted
(Yeung, 1996, pp. 78-84).</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">These old spaces of early Shanghainese modernity are
quickly replaced by three new built forms. The first are the various
above-ground, underground, and overhead expressways. Intersecting and
intertwining together, they make the whole city look as if it were trapped in a
python’s nest. The second thing that comes to the mind is commercial space.<a name="_ednref9" href="#_edn9"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[ix]</span></span></a>
Shopping malls<a name="_ednref10" href="#_edn10"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[x]</span></span></a>
line both the sides of the streets in downtown Shanghai, whereas hypermarkets
cluster at the periphery of the city (Diao, 2006)<a name="_ednref11" href="#_edn11"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xi]</span></span></a>. With
the speedy expansion of space (Li, 2006)<a name="_ednref12" href="#_edn12"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xii]</span></span></a>, the
style of constructions are increasingly uniform: nearly all of them name
themselves “squares”; shopping malls are
lined with chain stores on every level; chain supermarkets create mazes of
different sizes with dense goods shelves; in office buildings, glass doors and
plastic boards partition the office into many honeycomb-like cubicles, making
the people working in them increasingly look like worker bees; the hospitality
industry is overwhelmed with chain hotels of similar facilities and styles,
even customers often forget which hotel they stay in last time (Fulong, 1999).
The accelerated standardization process in Shanghai’s space highlights a
tendency to obtain the standard outlook of the imagined “international
metropolis” and an urgency to erase the distinct features inherited from the
past.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Thirdly, the office space of governments and state
monopolies expands in a unique sense: although the floor area has increased
significantly<a name="_ednref13" href="#_edn13"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xiii]</span></span></a>,
it is the upgrading and the move towards luxury that marks the change. Since
the early 1990s, luxurious office buildings with halls paved with marble floor,
central air conditioning system, shiny wood floors, CEO office suite with
separate bathroom, were built first by banks, then revenue departments,
telecommunication agencies, newspapers offices, television stations, courts,
and police stations of different levels, and at last governments of municipal,
district and even lower levels.<a name="_ednref14" href="#_edn14"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xiv]</span></span></a> Not
only the connotation of “work” has been enriched, but also other business
spaces outside the office have expanded with restaurants, coffee bars, official
reception hotels, training centers and vacation centers located in the office
buildings or on the outskirts of town or other cities (Leaf, 1997, pp. 156-159).
</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">The changes in the built form of the new IT City that
has emerged, are particularly important because they signal the ways in which
certain kinds of populations are made redundant in the city as it grows
physically more hostile to their life in it. The erasure of histories, of
public spaces, of spaces of political negotiation is symptomatic of the new
ideologies, policies and dreams that Shanghai-Pudong embody. Most of the
studies that look at these changes, concentrate only on the physical and
material aspects of it, and ignore the aesthetics, politics, and changes that
Internet technologies are bringing in, not only in the imagination of what
constitutes a city, but also in the material and lived practices of the people
in it (Appadurai, 1990). Government policies that ignore technologies, come to
dead-ends in their intervention, as they fail to recognise the new geographies
and terrains that the technology users navigate through. Interventions by the
Development Sector or the Civil Society Movements often fail to recognise the
structures of governance as informed by internet technologies, thus
perpetrating the very evils that they fight against. Dislocation and Migration,
which are complex issues, get reduced to only geography and physical places –
leading to a simplified structure of rehabilitation, largely propelled by the
vocabulary of the market and the state. Remunerations, economic rights and
livelihood are the only questions addressed. In the process Community rights,
structures of communication and networking, relationships within families and
societies, ineffable ties and bonds that keep the communities coherent – these
affective categories which are dislocated and forced to migrate because of the
presence of technologies, fail to register either in the scholarship or in the
practices in these areas. <strong><u></u></strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">This is where the blogosphere needs to be located – as
not merely producing a new space of engagement, but helping in recovering the
lost spaces of public participation and community communication. The blogosphere
is not merely the invention of a technology marked digital native or the
discovery of groups seeking alternative narratives. It is recognition of the
fact that the regular mainstream public discourse, interacts with the social
transformations and politics of our time and depend on the sustenance of public
spheres for the socio-cultural categories like communities, neighbourhoods,
public space, etc. to survive. The blogosphere, in the quickly changing,
hyper-real landscape of Shanghai-Pudong’s geography is the new variety store,
the new location for the Lao Hu Zhao and the space that the labyrinthine
networks of nongtangs are mapped on.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em>e-Governance and its discontents</em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The change in the
physical reorganisation of the city is not only a pragmatic decision. This disappearance of the public
space of gossip, information dissemination and distortion, of informal
conversations and deliberations tied in closely to the three levels of
government in Shanghai – district government, street office and alley office –
being able to increasingly control the leisure life of the Shanghainese through
administrative planning and organisation (Zhang, 2004). There is a clear link
between the government’s imagination of its own territory, the notion of the
citizen who is to occupy these spaces, and the material practices that happen
in these technology marked spaces (Feuchtwang, 2004). While it is an
acknowledged fact that the Chinese government does not follow the structures
and paradigms that a North-Western Democratic Liberal ideology that has
produced the category of Nation-State in most contemporary discourse, there are
still two specific forms of technology inflected governance structures which
China seems to share with other contexts which might be geo-politically different.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The e-Governance models,
which find resonances in most emerging contexts in the Global South, seem to
develop two simultaneous and often ironically related approaches towards
citizenship and administration, especially in the context of China. With its
already forked governance policies, which treat HongKong – its colonial success
story – differently from the rest of Mainland China (and the added complication
of Taiwan) the governance structures are marked by technology in significant
ways. These structures are suffused with irony, because of the tropes of
transparency and invisibility that they use to articulate their rationale and
processes.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The first is the
approach of Rural Development through ICT networks, positing an access based
model of participatory citizenship (Tarlo, 2003) and continuing the Development
rhetoric of uplift and reform of the deprived citizen. This particular kind of
governance structure re-imagines the beneficiary of state/government processes
as existing in a condition of invisibility, and outside of the folds of
technology. The particular emphasis on e-government, while it is located in the
urban settings, is actually intended for reaching the citizen in the remote
parts of the country, who does not have any engagement or direct interaction
with processes of governance. Despite China’s three tiered government
structure, the imagination of e-governance hold a strong currency because it
makes visible, the people, practices and communities which otherwise exist in
the subliminal and grey areas which were hitherto not in the focus of the
government. Fuelling the rhetoric of e-government is the premium on information
dissemination and transparent administration in order to enhance the domains of
life and labour in the rural parts of the country.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This approach draws its
strength from the Development agenda of reform and uplift as it markedly
emphasises the distance between the ‘haves and the have-nots’. However, the
valourisation of transparency goes hand-in-glove with the production of the
invisible (but cognisable) citizen who needs to be reproduced within the
paradigms of technology. The peasant, who has been at the back-bone of China’s
socialist political ideology, under this new articulation of transparency,
becomes invisible – robbed of the historicity, the cultural iconoclasms and the
empowerment that such policies earlier provided. Instead, the peasant becomes a
worker who needs to be rehabilitated into the changing geographies of Pudong,
the new IT city that requires a worker equipped with new skills and lifestyles.
This approach draws its strength from the Developmental agenda of reform and
uplift as it markedly emphasises the distance between the ‘haves and the
have-nots’ (Jaswal, 2005) and offers ICT enabled development as the panacea for
the problems of unemployment, illiteracy, chronic poverty, etc. This approach is made manifest in the
establishment of Telecentre kiosks, rural BPOs, e-literacy schools and mobile
vans, setting up of mobile and internet technology centres, digitisation of the
state’s resources, digital access centres to important data-sets, initiation of
projects like ‘One Home One Computer’, the e-literacy campaigns, and the
building of special economic zones (SEZ) and IT Corridors under the aegis of
e-governance (Hawks, 2009).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The second approach is
invested in the massive restructuration of the urban spaces to create
infrastructure that attracts foreign investment and ICT enabled multinational
corporations. This approach uses the language of creating a S.M.A.R.T. (Smart,
Moral, Accountable, Responsive, Transparent) State, modelling the new spaces
and politics around the new models of capital modernity (Appadurai, 1996) like
Singapore, Shanghai, Tokyo and Taipei. This model is nuanced by a vocabulary of
‘global citizenship and globalised economy’ (Abbas, 1997), glorifying the new
economic opportunities, flows of foreign capital, enhancement of lifestyle, and
the promise of hypervisibility in the globalisation networks. The building up
of network-neighbourhoods (Doheny-Farina, 1996), spaces of incessant commercial
consumption, post modern digitalised aesthetics of living and housing,
(Mitchell, 1996) infrastructure for ICT augmented lifestyles, spaces for
sculpting hyperspatial bodies, and recreational zones that offer apolitical
aesthetics of living (Chua, 2000), are all a part of this restructuration.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Contemporary analyses
that deploy both these approaches are often contained within the language and
the universes created by these approaches. Studies on e-governance concentrate
on the processes of infrastructure development, the economic parameters of
efficient administration, questions of rights and transparency and impact
analyses of the public private partnership which is at the basis of most e-governance
projects in India. Urban restructuration has found critique from disciplines
that focus largely upon the promissory implementation of State policies, on the
imbalance in the urban eco-systems, the new patterns of migration in the city,
the cultural and class mobility that the new economies offer, and the emergence
of the new middle class that becomes the figurehead of the IT revolution
(Huang, 2005). Most studies look upon technology as incidental or instrumental;
a tool towards an end. The relationship between ICTs and the State, and the
kind of technosocial evolution they produce are generally zones of silence in
most discourse. Both these discourses produce a certain hyper-visual citizen
subject who is either the champion of the new Information societies or the
victim of the digital divide that has ensued.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">ICTs are often posited
as neutral and transparent because they allow us to look at these two kinds of
citizenships on the opposite end of the digital spectrum. It can be argued that
the divides of ICTs are transparent and hence it offers clearly defined spaces
of intervention and uplift. The development sector around the world has
accepted this as a given and hence, along with the Governments, they have also
been urging a blanket development of infrastructure of access to technology for
a particular section of the society, in an attempt to ‘cure’ certain long
standing problems. As in the case of India, China is also fuelled by this
transparency rhetoric, which allows for the production of the power-user versus
the un-networked and has pinned its hopes on the transformative powers of
Internet Technologies. With more than two decades of ICT development in the
country, and especially in spaces like Shanghai-Pudong, behind them, China
seems to be facing a moment of crisis. On the one hand is its promotion and
adoption of internet and digital technologies, which encourages younger users
entering in “schools, colleges, universities and workforces to transform the
economic conditions” (Heng, 2006). On the other hand is the imagination of
these IT forces as transgressive, uncontrollable and in need of constant
supervision in order to retain existing government-citizenship relationships
and power structures. In the middle of this crisis, is another factor that the
obvious suspects and users of technology, who are more under the radar, are not
the people who are deploying technologies for political negotiation and using
technology platforms for political mobilisation. Despite the efforts at
green-washing its technologies and the production of the infamous Great
Fire-wall of China, there has been a sustained use of internet technologies for
resistance and subversion.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The spaces for
subversion rises from the fact that with the making of the IT city, there has
been a complex phenomenon of dislocation and migration, as several communities
were made redundant in the logic of the IT City and were removed from the city.
Many people from these communities re-entered the city as the new IT workforce
after going through a ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘skill building’ to not only be a
part of the IT labour groups but also to support the IT industry in the
construction of the physical infrastructure. Moreover, there has been a steady
flow of anonymous ‘outsiders’ who have found homes in the older nontangs and
factories, and are in the subliminal zones of regulation. As the city is
re-formed to make these people invisible (Abbas, 1997), their leisure space and
time shrink and they find themselves increasingly forming the new prosumers of internet
in Shanghai. However, in the transparency discourse that unfolds, these
populations remain invisible and find spaces of resistance and political
negotiation that their invisible status provides them. The promise of
Invisibility that treats them as Wetware (the biological combination of a
network consisting of Software and Hardware), allows for hope in the otherwise
diminishing spaces of political articulation in a growing authoritarian regime
in China.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em>Invisibility, Transparency and the
Internet</em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The paper ends by
re-formulating the relationship between the making of an IT City and the way in
which transparency as a rhetoric and technology-as-instrumental method fail to
account for the different kinds of changes that accompany the restructuring of these
cities. On the one hand, there is shrinkage of physical space and built form,
as new forms of technology infrastructure, global lifestyle and late
capitalistic economies expand to fill up the spaces which were earlier
available for political mobilisation, organisation and inhabitation. On the
other, there is a diminishing political landscape, where, with the integration
of the government with the market, there is a tendency to establish larger
regulation and censorship in order to retain the status quo relationship
between the government and the citizen, in the face of massive governance
transition. Both these conditions are produced by the rise and spread of
Information Technologies.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In the process, there
are also only two kinds of citizenships that are addressed by the e-governance
structures which work on a double edge: Firstly, they make the direct access
(defined either by abundance or lack of access) citizenships hyper-visual,
robbing them of nuances and looking upon them as implicated only in the discursive
practices of Internet technologies. Second, they render invisible, the other
supporting structures in order to highlight and focus on the economic
development and growth propelled by the rise of the IT industries. In other
words, they make the citizens who are central to the discourse, invisible, by
treating them as embodiments of the new economic markets and aspirations,
removing them from their traditional contexts, histories and spaces. Moreover,
they make invisible/transparent, populations who are not marked by the aura of
the Internet technologies, in order to bring into focus, the extraordinary
changes – both in the physical built form as well as in the realms of
governance – that have been initiated and accomplished with the making of the IT
City Shanghai-Pudong.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong> </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>References:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Abbas, Ackbar. 1997. <em>Hong Kong: Culture and
the Politics of Disappearance</em>. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University press.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. "The Coming
Community." In <em>Global Culture</em>, edited by Michael Featherstone. London:
Sage.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Feuchtwang, Stephen. 2004. <em>Making Place: State Projects, Globalisation
and Local Responses in China</em>. New York: Routledge Cavendish</p>
<p>Hawks, F.L. 2009. <em>A
Short History of Shanghai: Being an account of the growth and development of
the international settlement</em>.
Beijing: China Intercontinental Press.</p>
<p>Hiibbard, Peter. 2008. The Bund Shanghai : China Faces
the West. Odyssey Books and Guides.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Huang, Tsung-yi Michelle. 2004. <em>Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers :
Illusions of open space in HK, Tokyo and Shanghai</em>. Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Leaf, Michael. 1998. ‘Urban planning and urban
reality under Chinese economic reforms’, <em>Journal of Planning Education and
Research.</em> 18(2): 145–153.</p>
<p>Li,
Heng. 2006. “Behind the Spectacle of Commercial Real Estate,” <em>Xinmin Weekly</em>, 3rd issue (2006)</p>
<p>Mirsky, Jonathan. 2008. <em>The Britannica Guide to Modern China : A comprehensive introduction to
the world’s new economic giant</em>. London: Constable and Robinson Ltd.</p>
<p>Diao
Wenjun, “Analysis of the Present situation and Development Trend of
Hypermarkets in Shanghai,” <em>Shanghai
Articles</em>, 3rd issue (2006)</p>
<p> (STSN)
Shanghai Times Square
Newsletter. 2008. Issue No. 4. Shanghai.</p>
<p>Shu, Kewen. 2006. “the dynastic History of
Tiananmen Square”, <em>Life Week</em>, Issue 11. 27<sup>th</sup> March.</p>
<p>Sicheng, Liang. 1959. “Tiananmen Square”, <em>Architectural
Journal</em> Issue 9-10. pp. 12.</p>
<p>SSY
(<em>Shanghai Statistical Yearbook) 1986</em>,
Shanghai Statistics Bureau, (September, 1986), p18, p412.</p>
<p>SSY(a)
(shanghai Statistical Yearbook) 2005. Shanghai Statistics Bureau. China
Statistics Press. August 2005.</p>
<p>Stanat, Michael. 2005. <em>China’s Generation Y: Understanding the Future Leaders of the World’s
Next Superpower</em>. NY: Homa and Sekey Books.</p>
<p>Tang, Shih-che. 2009. ‘The club and the carrot of
China’s globalization.’ <em>Inter-Asia
Cultural Studies.</em> Volume 10, Number 2. Delhi: Routledge Journals.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Wu, Fulong. 1999. ‘The global and local
dimensions of place-making: remaking Shanghai as a world city’. <em>Urban
Studies</em>, 37(8): 1359–1377.</p>
<p>Xixian, Xu and Xu JianRong. 2004.<em> A Changing Shanghai.</em> Shangai: Shanghai People’s Fine Arts
Publishing House.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Yeung, Yue-man. 1996. <em>Shanghai: Transformation and Modernization Under China's Open Policy.</em>
Shanghai: <span class="addmd">Chinese University Press.<strong></strong></span></p>
<p>Zhang,
Jishun. , “The Linong of Shanghai: the political mobilization of grass-roots
and the trend of national social integration (1950-1955),” <em>Chinese Social Sciences Today</em>, 2nd issue, 2004</p>
<p>Zhang,
Xudong. 2002. “The Construct of Shanghai: Criticism of Urban Idols,
Non-mainstream Writing and the Diminishment of Modern Myths” <em>Literary Review</em>, the 5th edition</p>
<div><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="edn1">
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn1" href="#_ednref1"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[i]</span></span></a> The project wants to emphasize that it is
not attempting a historiography of the building of the IT City of
Shanghai-Pudong. Instead, by drawing selectively, different ways in which the
technology imaginaries (technopolises, intellectual labour, globally homogenous
geographies and time-lines, bodies marked by technology in their material
practices, etc ) of the Internet, find structure and form in the emerging IT
cities in Asia.</p>
</div>
<div id="edn2">
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn2" href="#_ednref2"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[ii]</span></span></a> Zhang Chunqiao, Secretary
of the Culture and Education Department of the Shanghai Municipal
Committee who accompanied DuBois to
Shanghai Mansion, specially mentioned DuBois’ visit in an article entitled “To
Climb the New Summit of Victory.”.</p>
</div>
<div id="edn3">
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn3" href="#_ednref3"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[iii]</span></span></a> In 1994, one Shanghai
government officer stated, “the government plans to remove or close down two
thirds of the factories located within [the range of] 106 square kilometers
from the city centre, namely, within the Inner Ring Road.”.<em> </em>Due to different reasons (one of
the main reasons is the increase of transferee cost because unsolved problems,
such as the proper placement of a large number of former workers, have been
bundled with the factory buildings and factory land), some factories still
remain in their original places, although most of them have already stopped
manufacturing and the workers dismissed. The industrial life/space has
disappeared with the disappearance of the factories. Ruins of this life/space
become some sort of commodity only because the land under the ruins still has
some value.</p>
</div>
<div id="edn4">
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn4" href="#_ednref4"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[iv]</span></span></a> On the day (1 October
1949) of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong suggested
rebuilding Tiananmen Square and making it a “grand and magnificent square.” See
(Kewen, 2006). Liang Sicheng, who always insisted on preserving the old Beijing
and opposed massive makeover, finally realized that the makeover was never
about architecture but about politics: “As for the scale of Tiananmen Square …
apart from considering the scale of man as a biological being and the scale of
construction appropriate to the man’s physiology, we should also take into
account the scale for the great collective requested by the political men in
the new society.” Liang, 1959, pp 12).</p>
</div>
<div id="edn5">
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn5" href="#_ednref5"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[v]</span></span></a> The People’s Square,
transformed in 1953 from the original racecourse (which was nationalized in
1951 by the Municipal Military Control Commission), surrounded by woods, and
paved with tiled and cemented floor, is the largest public space in Shanghai
and can accommodate over one million people. The Sino-Russian Friendship
Building, which was built in 1955 and was covering an area of 80,000 square
meters, was the city’s largest building after the liberation of Shanghai and
still ranks top in terms of its indoor space in today’s Shanghai. The Cultural
Plaza, transformed in 1952 from the Greyhound Racecourse, had 12,500 seats and
was the largest indoor hall in Shanghai.</p>
</div>
<div id="edn6">
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn6" href="#_ednref6"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[vi]</span></span></a> It is a unique store that
sells boiled water in Shanghai.</p>
</div>
<div id="edn7">
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn7" href="#_ednref7"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[vii]</span></span></a> Shanghai’s housing
shortage started in the early 20th century instead of the 1950s. The living
space within Shanghai city is 16,100,000 square meters in total but 3.9 square
meters per capita. During the 32 years from 1952 to 1985, 21,720,000 square
meters of housing were built within the city and the registered population
increased from 5,300,000 to 6,980,000. The housing shortage was still serious
since by 1985, the living space had only reached 5.4 square meters per capita.
(SSY, 1986). What needs to be clarified is that the statics of 1949 does not
include the shabby slum houses commonly referred to as “gun di long.” </p>
</div>
<div id="edn8">
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn8" href="#_ednref8"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[viii]</span></span></a> This is an increasingly popular
new word in Shanghai over the last 20 years, which refers to the people who
come from other provinces, especially the rural areas, and live in Shanghai but
do not have permanent residence in Shanghai. According to the Shanghai
Statistics Bureau’s report on March 2006, the immigrating labor population in
Shanghai was 3,750,000. 2,840,000 of this population is in the manufacturing,
construction, retail, and catering industry and engaged in low-income manual
work. The immigrating population should be over 4 million if the large number
of people (such as those in the household service business) and their children
be taken into calculation. </p>
</div>
<div id="edn9">
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn9" href="#_ednref9"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[ix]</span></span></a> In Shanghai, the floor
area of shops has increased seven-fold from 4,030,000 square meters in 1990 to
2,857,000 square meters in 2004 and that of hotels has increased three-fold
from 6,580,000 square meters in 1990 to 2,204,000 square meters in 2004. The
increase of commercial space is even greater if that of commercial office
buildings is calculated as well. (SSY(a), 2005, pp. 198)</p>
</div>
<div id="edn10">
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn10" href="#_ednref10"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[x]</span></span></a> Take the area around
Zhongshan Park for example, although it was one of the earliest developed
leisure areas in Shanghai, there was only one small department store in the
mid-1980s and the retail business developed slowly. However, within these ten
years, with the completion of Zhongshan Park Station along the subway line 2
and light rail line 3, five multi-story shopping malls have been built, all
within a radius of 500 meters. The newest among them is a 58-storey building
with four levels of basement and nine levels of shopping mall.</p>
</div>
<div id="edn11">
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn11" href="#_ednref11"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xi]</span></span></a> By the end of 2005,
hypermarkets measuring over 5000 square meters within Shanghai have reached 97
and 28 more have chosen their locations and would be opened soon. Because of a
large number of hypermarkets and the intense competition brought about, a
considerable number of them mainly profit from land appreciation rather than
from retail. </p>
</div>
<div id="edn12">
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn12" href="#_ednref12"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xii]</span></span></a> By the end of 2005, the
commercial real estate in Shanghai has reached a total of 2,900,000 square
meters with 2.6 square meters per capita, far exceeding Hong Kong’s 1.2 square
meters per capita.</p>
</div>
<div id="edn13">
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn13" href="#_ednref13"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xiii]</span></span></a> Barely 6 million square
meters in 1990, the floor area of office buildings in Shanghai reached a total
of 4,012,000 square meters in 2004. See <em>Shanghai
Statistical Yearbook 2005</em>. Edited by Shanghai Statistics Bureau, published
by China Statistics Press in August 2005, p 198. The statistical material on
the increase of floor area of commercial office building cannot be found for
the present. Even if the material were obtained, it would not be enough since a
large area of commercial office building has been rented by many state-owned
monopoly agencies. However, the expansion of government office space is great
even if it take up only one tenth of the space of office buildings. </p>
</div>
<div id="edn14">
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn14" href="#_ednref14"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xiv]</span></span></a> Such phenomenon exists
not only in Shanghai but all over the country, especially in cities and towns
of low economic level. The towering and luxurious government, bank, taxation,
and police buildings create an ironic contrast with the low and shabby
constructions close by. </p>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/finalpaper'>http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/finalpaper</a>
</p>
No publishernishantShanghaiCyberculturesArchitectureCensorshipCommunities2012-08-10T08:33:48ZBlog Entry10 Legendary Obscene Beasts
http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/itcity4
<b>In the second of his articles, Nishant Shah analyses a peculiar event of vandalism which has now become the core of free speech and anti-censorship debates in mainland China. Looking at the structure of user generated knowledge websites and the specific event on the Chinese language encyclopaedia, 'Baidu Baike', he shows how, in cities where spaces of political spectacle and public protest are quickly diminishing, the Internet has become a tool for producing new public spaces of demonstration and protest. The story about 'Cao Ni Ma' stands as an iconic representation of the playful processes by which young people in different contexts and cultures engage with the politics in their immediate environments.</b>
<p></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>User Generated Knowledge sites:</strong> The world of knowledge production was never as shaken as it was
with the emergence of the Wikipedia – a user generated knowledge production
system, where anybody who has any knowledge, on almost anything in the world
can contribute to share it with countless users around the world. The camps
around Wikipedia are fairly well divided: there are those who swear by it and those who swear against it. There are scholars, activists and
lobbyists who celebrate the democratisation of knowledge production as the next
logical evolutionary step to the democratic access to knowledge. They
appreciate the wisdom of crowds and revel in the joy that in the much discussed
<em>Nature</em> magazine experiment, the
number of errors in Wikipedia and its biggest opponent, <em>Encyclopaedia Britannica</em>, were almost the same. And then there are
those who think of the Wikipedia and other such peer knowledge production and
sharing systems as erroneous, unreliable and a direct result of collapsing
standards that the vulgarisation of knowledge has succumbed to in the age where
information has become currency. Add to this the hue and cry from academics
around the globe who lament about falling research standards as the copy and paste
generations (Vaidhyanathan; 2008) in classrooms skim over subjects in Wikipedia
rather than analysing and studying them in detail from those hallowed
treasuries of knowledge – reference books.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">As can be expected, the
questions about the veracity, verifiability, trustworthiness and integrity of
Wikipedia and other such user generated knowledge sharing sites (including
Youtube, Flickr, etc.) are carried on in sombre tones by zealots who are
devoted to their beliefs. However, the one question that remains unasked, in
the discussion of these sites, is what purpose it might serve
beyond the obvious knowledge production exercise.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>The Story:</strong> In China,
where the government exerts great control over regulating online information,
Wikipedia had a different set of debates which would not feature in the more
liberal countries – the debates were around what would be made accessible to a
Wikipedia user from China and what information would be blanked out to fit
China’s policy of making information that is ‘seditious ‘and disrespectful’,
invisible. After the skirmishes with Google, where the search engine company
gave in to China’s
demands and offered a more censored search engine that filtered away results
based on sensitive key-words and issues, Wikipedia was the next in line to
offer a controlled Internet knowledge base to users in China.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">However, another
user-generated knowledge site, more popular locally and with more stringent
self-regulating rules than Wikipedia, became the space for political
commentary, satire, protest and demonstration against the draconian censorship
regimes that China is trying to impose on its young users. The website Baidu
Baike (pinyin for Baidu Encyclopaedia), became popular in 2005 and was offered
by the Chinese internet search company Baidu. With more than 1.5 million Chinese
language articles, Baidu has become a space for much debate and discussion with
the Digital Natives in China.
Offered as a home-grown response to Wikipedia, Baidu implements heavy
‘self-censorship to avoid displeasing the Chinese Government’ (BBC; 2006) and
remains dedicated to removing ‘offensive’ material (with a special emphasis on
pornographic and political events) from its shared space.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">It is in this restrictive
regime of information sharing and knowledge production, that the Digital
Natives in China,
introduced the “10 legendary obscene beasts” meme which became extremely
popular on Baidu. Manipulating the Baidu Baike’s potential for users to share
their knowledge, protestor’s of China’s
censorship policy and Baidu’s compliance to it, vandalised contributions by
creating humorous pages describing fictitious creatures, with names vaguely
referring to Chinese profanities, with homophones and characters using
different tones.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The most famous of these
creations was Cao Ni Ma <span class="apple-style-span"> (Chinese: </span><span class="apple-style-span">草泥</span><span class="apple-style-span">马</span><span class="apple-style-span">), literally "Grass Mud Horse", which uses the same
consonants and vowels with different tones for the Chinese language profanity
which translates into “Fuck Your Mother”
</span><a title="Mandarin Chinese profanity" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese_profanity#Mother">cào nǐ mā</a><span class="apple-style-span"> (</span><span class="apple-style-span">肏你妈</span><span class="apple-style-span">) . This mythical animal belonging to the Alpaca race had dire
enemies called héxiè (</span><a title="w:zh:河蟹 (網路用語)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/zh:%E6%B2%B3%E8%9F%B9_(%E7%B6%B2%E8%B7%AF%E7%94%A8%E8%AA%9E)">河蟹</a><span class="apple-style-span">), literally translated
as “river crabs”, very close to the word héxié (</span><span class="apple-style-span">和</span><span class="apple-style-span">谐</span><span class="apple-style-span">) meaning harmony, referring to
the government’s declared ambition of creating a “harmonious society” through
censorship. The Cao Ni Ma, has now become a popular icon appearing in videos
distributed on YouTube, in fake documentaries, in popular Chinese internet
productions, and even in themed toys and plushies which all serve as mobilising
points against censorship and control that the Chinese government is trying to
control. </span><img src="file:///C:/Users/owner/AppData/Local/Temp/moz-screenshot-3.png" alt="" /><img src="file:///C:/Users/owner/Desktop/caonima1.jpg" alt="" /></p>
<div align="center"><object height="313" width="384"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/wKx1aenJK08&hl=en_GB&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed width="384" height="313" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/wKx1aenJK08&hl=en_GB&fs=1"></embed></object></div>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span class="apple-style-span">However, the reaction from those
who do not understand the entire context is, predictably, bordering on the
incredulous. Most respondents on different blogs and meme sites, think of these
as mere puns and word-plays and juvenile acts of vandalism. The Chinese
monitoring agencies themselves failed to recognise the profane and the
political intent of these productions and hence they survived on Baidupedia, to
become inspiring and iconic symbols of the slow and steady protest against
censorship and the right to information act in China. Following these brave acts,
Baidu’s user base also experimented v</span><span class="apple-style-span"></span><span class="apple-style-span">ery successfully with well-for</span><span class="apple-style-span"></span><span class="apple-style-span">med parodies
and satires, opening</span><span class="apple-style-span"></span><span class="apple-style-span"> </span><span class="apple-style-span"></span><span class="apple-style-span">up the first spaces in modern Chinese history, for
political criticism and negotiation</span><a name="_ftnref1" href="#_ftn1"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a><span class="apple-style-span">. <br /></span></p>
<p align="center" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="apple-style-span">What is</span><span class="apple-style-span"></span><span class="apple-style-span"> discar</span><span class="apple-style-span"></span><span class="apple-style-span">ded or ove</span><span class="apple-style-span"></span><span class="apple-style-span">rlooke</span><span class="apple-style-span"></span><span class="apple-style-span">d as jes</span><span class="apple-style-span"></span><span class="apple-style-span">t or harmles</span><span class="apple-style-span"></span><span class="apple-style-span"></span><span class="apple-style-span">s p</span><span class="apple-style-span"></span><span class="apple-style-span">r</span><span class="apple-style-span"></span><span class="apple-style-span">anks, are
actually symptomatic of a new generation using digital tools and spaces to
revisit what it means to be politically active and engaged. The 10 obscene
legendary creatures, can be easily read as juvenile fun
and the actions of a youth that is quickly losing its connection with the
immediate contemporary questions. However, a contextual reading, shows that this is symptomatic of a new internet public in a country where physical public spaces of political protest and demonstration are quickly diminishing. In Shanghai, the iconic People's Square, once an area where thousand assembled in order to realise a political dream has already been cut down to five times its original size, to make way for the malls and hotels and multiplexes that now surround the token park in the centre. At the Bund, the presence of the paramilitary, that monitors any form of 'undesriable' activity by the native Chinese can often be frightening. As physical spaces come under abundant surveilance and places shrink to house the demands of the IT city, the young people quickly find new spaces of political engagement and the Cao Ni Ma story is about how this political negotiation is informed by the aesthetics of gaming, viral distribution, irreverence and playfulness that the Internet technologies shape. </span></p>
<div>
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="ftn1">
<p><a name="_ftn1" href="#_ftnref1"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">[1]</span></span></a> A more
serious political satire that moves beyond just punning and avoiding censorship
was found in the now-deleted entry for revolutionary hero Wei Guangzheng (伟光正, taken from 伟大, 光荣, 正确, "great, glorious, correct"). An excerpt from it is
included here for sampling.</p>
<p><strong>Wei Guangzheng</strong></p>
<p>Comrade Wei Guangzheng is a superior
product of natural selection. In the course of competition for survival,
because of certain unmatched qualities of his genetic makeup, he has a great
ability to survive and reproduce, and hence Wei Guangzheng represents the most
advanced state of species evolution.</p>
<p>Here is the evolution of Wei Guangzheng's
thinking: Since the day of his birth, comrade Wei Guangzheng established a
guiding ideology for the people's benefit, and in the course of connecting it
with the real circumstances of his beloved Sun Kingdom, a process of repeated
comparisons that involved the twists and turns of campaigns of encirclement and
suppression, his ideology finally realized a historic leap forward and
generated two major theoretic achievements. The first great theoretic leap was
the idea of leading a handful of people to take up arms to cause trouble,
rebellion, and revolution in order to build a brave new world, and to successfully
seize power. This was the "spear ideology." The second great
theoretic leap was a theory, with Sun
Kingdom characteristics,
in which Wei Guangzheng was unswervingly upheld as leader and the people were
forever prevented from standing up. This was the "shield theory."
Under the guidance of these two great theoretic achievements, comrade Wei
Guangzheng won victory after victory. Practice has proven, "Without Wei
Guangzheng, there would be no Sun
Kingdom." Following
the road of comrade Wei Guangzheng was the choice of the people of the Sun Kingdom
and an inevitable trend of historical development.</p>
<p> </p>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/itcity4'>http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/itcity4</a>
</p>
No publishernishant2010-03-05T06:27:53ZBlog EntryBreaks and Ruptures: In the midst of IT
http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/wedding
<b>In this first story, Nishant looks at the ways in which internet technologies shape multiple imaginations. In the narration of the story, the contextualisation and the responses that the story-tellers make apparent, he located the internet in the midst of contestation, as it restructures social boundaries, traditions and communities. The story of an 'internet wedding' that stands as an iconic landmark for different generations, looking upon the Internet as a radical catalyst for change, lays out the first foundations for the framework of transformation and invisibility this project has embarked upon.</b>
<p></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Breaks and Ruptures: IT and its discontents</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In Shanghai,
conversations of technology, eventually become conversations about younger
users of technology who are looked upon the legitimate users of these
technologised spaces, and more conversant with the quickly changing trends and
fashions on the internet. As the country invests heavily into ICT development,
promotes the making of Shanghai as the global hub of ICT industries and
economies, and encourages younger users to extensively use digital technologies
in their life, the digital generation gap has never been more visible than in
the crowded, buzzing, video-game-like streets of Shanghai.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">These Xiao
Huangli (Little emperors), who have already been heralded as brats because of
China’s one-child policy and the growing
up in the liberalised China, are an object of great anxiety and concern for an
older generation who doesn’t seem to understand them. Sometimes called The
Strawberry Generation (CaoMei Zu), this population of young adults is looked at
with derision or wonder – Wonder because of their soft and pink strawberry like
appearances which reflect their new ethos and lifestyle expectations, and
derision because they are ‘soft’, indulging only in acts of self-gratification
which seem pointless, selfish, or sometimes foolish. Stories trickle out from
old retired army men who sit in the few public parks playing Mahjong, or the
women in the gardens, dancing with their fans and practicing Tai-Chi to keep
their spirits in balance, or from the middle-aged men and women who grew up in
the time of the revolution, who talk about how their
children/grand-children/nieces-and-nephews all seem to occupy a world that is
alien, disrupting the harmony of the established Chinese life.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In the Special
Economy Zones in Shanghai – What is popularly called the Free Trading Zone –
scores of immigrants who have shifted to the new city from rural parts of
China, recreate, with nostalgia, the past where children were trained to be
responsible and connected to their environments. In these economy zones, where
the designer brands have exploded on every street and consumption is the only
re-creation, hard working parents who dote on their only child, shake their
heads in despair about the way the new generations lead their lives – “they
work, they spend and when they run out of money, they borrow from their parents
to sustain a life devoted entirely to enjoyment” said one of my subjects –
mother to a seventeen year old teenage daughter, who works along with her
school and earns enough pocket money to indulge her desires. “There is no
saving. There is no worry about the future. And there is no care for the
family” her friend, another mother to a twenty year old boy agrees.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In our
conversations, they tell me a story which I must narrate to you. For the
Chinese families, I have been told, the biggest occasion of celebration is a
wedding. Conducted with great gusto, it involves a lot of people, noise,
drinking, laughing, dancing, fireworks and grand lavish parties. Especially in
Shanghai, weddings are incredibly rich and occasions for the involved families
to show their affluence, status, wealth and success to the rest of the
communities. Like in India, people in China rarely have marriages – what they
have are big elaborate weddings which are almost vertiginous in their opulence.
But with technology, and the changing times, especially with the yint<img src="file:///C:/Users/owner/AppData/Local/Temp/moz-screenshot-1.png" alt="" />ewang (one
of the many words Mandarin has for Internet), there are young people who are
doing strange things.<img src="file:///C:/Users/owner/AppData/Local/Temp/moz-screenshot.png" alt="" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The story is a
few years old, but in the minds of both these women, it is illustrative of how
times have changed and the Chinese family, caught in these Hard Times, is on
the rocks. The story is quite brief – a young man and a young woman, were
wangyou (Internet friends) and had met on a site devoted to a particular
automotive brand. Their friendship quickly blossomed into love and they decided
to get married. However, instead of having a wedding which their families
participated in, they put out an open invitation to strangers on the internet
to come and attend the wedding – the caveat? That only those who owned the particular
brand of car over which the happy couple fell in love were invited. And thus a
Car-Wedding came into being. About a month after the announcement, when the
bride and the groom proceeded to the venue of the party, they were at the head
of a procession of 97 cars, each one exactly like the other. The parking lot
was eventually filled with owners of the cars who had come, bearing gifts and
smiles, to attend the wedding of strangers who they never met, but knew because
they had the same interest in cars.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">For the two
women narrating the story to me, this was obviously a symptom of breaking
families, traditions and social structures with the introduction of the
internet in their lives. Interestingly, not long after I had heard the story
from them, I also stumbled across it in my conversations with a younger set of
people, largely in high school, and ranging from ages 15 – 19. For them, the
story was a fascinating account of how this is a symptom of a break from
families, communities, traditions and social structures. It was interesting to
me, how they said almost the same things but their tone was more of celebration
and joy, optimism and hope rather than the despair and shock that had been
expressed by the two women. This dichotomous approach to the internet in
Shanghai, for me, becomes symptomatic of the tensions, the imaginations and the
problematic that the emergence of Internet technologies and their potentials
for subverting the erstwhile dominant is producing.</p>
<p>
I am going to leave this first story here for
the time being. Let us think of this as
the foundation of the larger framework that I want to build for you. However,
we will come back to that once I have told the other two stories about youth,
technology, and the changing shape of Shanghai.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/wedding'>http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/wedding</a>
</p>
No publishernishant2009-12-19T10:12:47ZBlog EntryChina's Generation Y : Youth and Technology in Shanghai
http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/GenerationY
<b>Within the context of internet technologies in China, Nishant Shah, drawing from his seven month research in Shanghai, looks at the first embodiment of these technologies in the urbanising city. In this post, he gives a brief overview of the public and academic discourse around youth-technology usage of China's Generation Y digital natives. He draws the techno-narratives of euphoria and despair to show how technology studies has reduced technology to tools and usage and hence even the proponents of internet technologies, often do a disservice to the technology itself. He poses questions about the politics, mechanics and aesthetics of technology and offers the premise upon which structures of reading resistance can be built. The post ends with a preview of the three stories that are to appear next in the series, to see how youth engagement and cultural production can be read as having the potentials for social transformation and political participation for the Digital Natives in China.</b>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/GenerationY'>http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/GenerationY</a>
</p>
No publishernishantCyberspaceSocial mediaShanghaiCyborgsCyberculturesDigital Natives2009-09-21T14:09:16ZBlog EntryIT and the cITy
http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/itcity
<b>Nishant Shah tells ten stories of relationship between Internet Technologies and the City, drawing from his experiences of seven months in Shanghai. In this introduction to the city, he charts out first experiences of the physical spaces of Shanghai and how they reflect the IT ambitions and imaginations of the city. He takes us through the dizzying spaces of Shanghai to see how the architecture and the buildings of the city do not only house the ICT infrastructure but also embody it in their unfolding. In drawing the seductive nature of embodied technology in the physical experience of Shanghai, he also points out why certain questions about the rise of internet technologies and the reconfiguration of the Shanghai-Pudong area have never been asked. In this first post, he explains his methdologies that inform the framework which will produce the ten stories of technology and Shanghai, and how this new IT City, delivers its promise of invisibility.</b>
<p></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Shanghai. City of bits, bytes and
Baozi. China’s home-grown success story that eclipses the colonial legends of
HongKong. The city that was, until the Bejing Olympics, the showcase city which
is now working hard at recovering some of its stolen glory as it prepares for
the World Trade Expo in 2010. A city that is constantly at war with itself,
trying to museumise its past, eradicate pockets of history and times, and
running to escape its present and live in a futuristic tomorrow. A city that
broke the distinctions of the public and the private, by privatising all that
was public, and by encouraging the private to be constructed for a public
spectacle. There are many stories of Shanghai to be told, but the one that
needs to be told now, is about the space of the city and how, in its attempt to
become an IT city, it has become a city of surfaces, all reminding you, in an
overwhelming hypervisual way that is the predominant aesthetic of cyberspaces,
that it is the city that not only houses technology but also embodies it,
becoming, possibly, the only city in Asia that brings the IT back into the
City.</p>
<img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/shanghai/image_preview" alt="Aerial view" class="image-left" title="Aerial view" />
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">A cursory glance around you,
perhaps travelling in the uber efficient metro system that feeds into the
mobile metaphor of accelerated speed and space that Shanghai has become, or
just walking down the more touristy XinTianDi where the rich and the famous of
Shanghai’s society hang out, or walking down the HuaiHai Road where
sky-scrapers fortress the sky and shopping malls greet you with neon-lit spaces
of consumption, you are overwhelmed at the significant and ubiquitous presence
of internet technologies. The buildings are designed to be interfaces, rather
than walls, covered constantly with the graffiti of digital advertisements,
live weather and stock updates, displaying the latest block-buster movie, or
just presenting a kaleidoscopic array of lights spiralling in a dizzying,
schizophrenic style on the surfaces of the buildings. As you walk through the
sci-fi inspired urban landscape, you try and suppress the feeling of being
inside a giant-size arcade game, waiting for a gobbling monster to come and
devour you, and continue browsing at the city that never remains the same –
either the surfaces mutate so that not even signboards or billboards remain the
same, or the very buildings disappear into rubble under the shadows of gigantic
cranes, as a concentrated demand for real estate necessitates a constant
recycling of limited space (The estimate says that 60 per cent of Shanghai gets
rebuilt every ten years), or high speed transport dissolves the city into a
blur so that only the biggest and the brightest buildings stay as north-stars
to the fluid geography of the city.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">If you happen to stand on the
magnificent Bund in PuXi (The older Shanghai), you keep on looking down at the
ground beneath your feet, making sure that it is still there, because the
slightly lurid but dazzling sky-line that faces you, with huge LCD screens
mounted on buildings, lights flirting with low lying clouds on the top of
gigantic buildings, and a constant buzz of electricity breaking the waves in
the Huangpu river, you know that you are in a city that gives IT its address.
No other city in Asia – not even the almost-not-Asia spaces of Tokyo or
Singapore – gives you the assurance of being completely and totally immersed in
the glory of Internet technologies. Shanghai stands, networked, connected,
mobile, accelerated, and in a time-less vacuum that hoovers the future into the
present, as a city that technology studies will have to reckon with in a
paradigm of its own.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Bund/image_preview" alt="Shanghai Bund" class="image-right" title="Shanghai Bund" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">And so strong is this seduction
of technology that conversations about technology and its place in Shanghai,
always revolves around the surface – about the building of the surface, about
the dissolution of depth (temporal or spatial),
and about imagining the city only in terms of light, connectivity, and
speed. So that the historicity in PuXi
becomes a flat display of the Chinese Way (Zhongguo Fangshi) and the
work-in-progress present in PuDong remains a quest for the future. In this split discourse, the questions and concerns - about governance, about citizenship, about regulation, about cultural production and political negotiation - become invisible. Like the buildings, which get guised in digital cloaks, the questions that pressingly need to be asked but are always postponed, also get cloaked in the rhetoric of development propelled by ICTs and globalisation. In a city that was constructed to eternally deflect attention, ownership or voices, how does one begin to scratch at the surfaces (Literally and figuratively) to search for something more than narratives of consumption, solipsist self-gratification, and self-congratulatory development?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">It is with this agenda, in this city, torn and
marked and seamlessly stitched by technology, that I start to unravel my
questions about Internet and Society in China, trying to look at relationships
between technologies, city spaces and identities, drawing from seven months spent
at the Centre for Contemporary Studies at the Shanghai University. These stories, written with retrospective memory and embellished by the privilege of
hindsight, posit a set of questions about Internet technologies, construction
of city spaces, and manifestation of identities in China, but especially in
Shanghai, to locate potentials of social transformation, political
participation, engagement and discourse, which has not been transplanted on
technology studies in China. In the process it also lays down a framework to
understand how, in an oppressive or authoritarian regime, the cultural becomes
the grounds upon which foundations of new political intervention and social
change can be built.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This blog, in its ten different
entries, relies on academic and popular discourse, semi-structured interviews,
participant observation, field work, conversations, and personal experiences that
I collected in my stay there, trying to deal with the double translations of
culture and language. Whenever I have been unsure – and those moments have been
many – I have tried to discuss and debate ideas with colleagues, friends, peers
and participants, to ensure that the observations or arguments are qualified by
more than just a neo-colonial meaning making sensibilities. Despite that rigour, if faults remain, they
are all mine, and hopefully will serve as points of entry into a fruitful
discourse.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/itcity'>http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/itcity</a>
</p>
No publishernishantCyberspaceinternet and societyShanghaiICT4DDigital NativesCyberculturesDigital subjectivitiesIT Cities2009-09-18T10:45:27ZBlog Entry