Centre for Internet and Society

Nishant Shah: “We will develop new textual and visual practices to facilitate the transfer of knowledge worldwide”

praskrishna — 2014-03-06T12:05:45Z

Today we are starting with a new format for the blog of the Hybrid Publishing Lab. There will be an interview series with our International Tandem Partners giving an insight on their current work, interest and cooperation with HP.

Read Dr. Shah's interview by Julia Rehfeldt published on the website of Hybrid Publishing Lab

First up is our Tandem Partner Dr. Nishant Shah, Research Associate at Common Media Lab and Hybrid Publishing Lab. He is the co-founder and Director-Research at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India.

Julia Rehfeldt: Dr. Shah, can you introduce yourself briefly und tell us what you are currently concerned with in your research?

Dr. Nishant Shah: This is a question that has always flummoxed me. I have spent all of the last decade trying to figure out how to explain what I do and what my research concerns are and I never have one straightforward answer to give.

The easiest way to answer this would be to say that I wear many hats. I am deeply interested in looking at how the digital shift is changing the way in which we see the world around us. And so my work spans several sectors, disciplines and intersections, trying to look at the mechanics and logics, logistics and structures of the world that we live in.

At the Hybrid Publishing Lab, as an International Tandem Partner, I look at the knowledge infrastructures of the digital times. I learn from the research and practice of my colleagues to explore the future of academic publishing, and I try to critically think through questions of Intellectual Property, Open Access movements, and concerns of Digital Humanities in the global knowledge circuits. Apart from that, I like to translate my research and knowledge for different stakeholders, to work with practitioners, policy makers, artists, technologists, hackers, legal scholars and development actors at the intersection of Internet and Society. As the Director – Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, I have been trying to develop South-based global networks that examine the conditions of being human, being social, and being political in emerging network societies. I also enjoy exploring new forms and content of pedagogy for students in and out of the classrooms, to develop new conditions of learning through and with digital media and cultures.

Rehfeldt: What was the most significant change, talk or lecture you experienced in 2013 that had an impact on the rights of open access or on your personal insights on that matter?

Dr. Shah: I think, on a very personal and a professional level, the death of Aaron Swartz and the horrific face of Intellectual Property tyrannies that surround the academic publishing which ironically focuses on questions of human liberty, values, equity and access, has had the most dramatic impact on me. Aaron Swartz committed suicide just over a year ago, and the conditions of his persecution, on the behalf of the American legal system, the intellectual property conglomerates and a globally reputed university that claims to build better futures for our digital worlds, has shocked most of us.

While playing the blame-game is redundant now – it is not going to bring back a young man who only believed in dreams of utopic sharing and commons – it is important to remind us that these battles of information and intellectual property are not for niche circles. We are increasingly living in worlds where more and more of our everyday life is being mediated, mitigated and measured in big data and quantified services.

We don’t only live in information age, but we also live through information, constantly producing data. And the technologies we use, the applications we live with, the platforms we live on, the social networks that we belong to, all take our information and data and copyright it so that we have almost no rights over it. This problem becomes only more amplified in the traditional academic knowledge industries where publicly funded research and practice gets hidden behind paywalls so that it remains in niche circles of access to those with privilege. We are reaching a stage where not only our formal knowledge but even our thoughts, desires and memories are quickly being contained in forms and formats that are no longer accessible to us.

2013 has shown that the more we lose control of our data, the more we lose battles of access to our collective knowledge, the more we concede our rights to information, which is the de facto currency of our times, the more we are going to be at the service of private and governmental conglomerates that shall control and contain the possibilities of radical transformation and change in our future.

Rehfeldt: You are currently involved in setting up a ‘Making Change’ project based on your paper ‘Whose change is it, anyway?’ published April 2013. Can you tell us what prompted your reflections in that paper, and what you seek to achieve with the project?

Dr. Shah: The ‘Making Change‘ project is an example of the multi-stakeholder, multi-disciplinary, knowledge methods and production that I am interested in. It is shaped by the framework proposed in the ‘Whose Change is it anyway?’ concept paper that proposes that in order to look at the change processes around us, we need to change the ways in which forms, formats, conditions, structures, processes, and life-cycles of knowledge practices need to be re-examined. The project aims to build conceptual frameworks by engaging different change actors in digital storytelling to understand how we analyse and examine the radical processes of change in the times to come.

Making Change is a knowledge exploration through which we seek to unpack the form, function, and practice of social and political change in emerging network societies. With this project, we will map existing traditional and innovative change practices through new knowledge methods and propose hybrid ways of building a knowledge commons that helps consolidate, curate and disseminate these new insights for change actors.

Hence, we will create a Knowledge Commons. The Knowledge Commons is a mash-up of resources, which we will set in motion through four distinct processes of getting insight into the mechanics, logistics, and catalysts of social and political change:

1. In this project, we will use new methods of collaborative knowledge production methods that bring in different knowledge stakeholders and actors to reflect upon and consolidate their existing projects.

2. We will develop new textual and visual practices to facilitate the transfer of knowledge worldwide.

3. We will work with existing knowledge communities – academia, policy, and practice – to build pedagogic resources for training knowledge visionaries about the future of change.

4. We will produce, curate and disseminate knowledge prototypes through storytelling to debate, question and re-energize discussions on important keywords and concepts in the change narratives.

The core of the Knowledge Commons will consist of new narratives and prototypes of how these narratives might help other approaches for social and political change. We shall further organize these narratives to train and help social change actors to develop better strategies of working within digital and network societies. The Knowledge Commons seeks to generate cross-fertilization between different networks of knowledge actors to generate critical insights to gain access, exchange and contribute to knowledge dialogues.

The Knowledge Commons is not just an online platform, but is built up through a combination of knowledge generating workshops (production sprints) as well as reflections, which are curated through online dialogues and critique. The production sprints invite the key change actors from our networks to incite conversations inspired by the thought piece ‘Whose Change is it Anyway?’. The conversations will be further annotated by the ‘Making Change’ white paper which offers more complex and nuanced ways of looking at the contexts, catalyst and processes of change embedded in particular movements.

Rehfeldt: There has been a lot of talk about ‘Twitter revolutions’ and ‘Blackberry riots’ – what would you say do digital technologies contribute to contemporary social movements and political action in the public sphere more generally?

Dr. Shah: I have spent some time trying to do away with the binaries and polarised responses that phrases like ‘Twitter Revolutions’ and ‘Blackberry Riots’ produce. They seem to bring pre-defined responses – they either suggest that the emergence of new digital technologies and applications, by their very presence, are producing radical change practices. They deny the historical conditions, the political contexts, the social and cultural practices of the region, and the structures of inequity and injustice that are often characteristic to particularly geographies and cultures. They refuse to understand that the digital does not merely produce things new – instead, it helps extend the existing movements of social and political change and are a part of a much larger paradigm shift. They alienate existing human endeavours of change and create false dichotomies like the old and new activisms, or traditional and digital movements.

I think it is better to understand that the digital produces ruptures and interruptions in the narrative of change; but the digital also has historical continuities which need to be better embedded in the geographical and political contexts of change. At the end of the day, we need to debunk the idea that digital activism around the globe is the same. Just because everybody uses Twitter to orchestrate people’s movements in different countries, it doesn’t mean that they are doing the same thing or in the same way. We need to do away with the homogenizing rhetoric of the digital that presumes that digital cultures are universal, and learn to look at the intersections of life that inform and are shaped by the emergence of the digital technologies.

Rehfeldt: To finish up, is there an interesting online article, or video you have read or seen lately which you could suggest to our readers?

Dr. Shah: I think one of the most interesting collections around digital and new activism last year was the anthology edited by Kees Biekart: Development and Change – Special Issue: FORUM 2013

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/nishant-shah-we-will-develop-new-textual-and-visual-practices-to-facilitate-the-transfer-of-knowledge-worldwide

Video Games: A Case Study of a Cross-cultural Video Collaboration

Larissa Hjorth and Nishant Shah — 2014-01-31T12:02:17Z

A new book focusing on Palestinian artists’ video, edited by Bashir Makhoul and published by Palestinian Art Court- al Hoash, 2013, includes a chapter co-authored by Larissa Hjorth and Nishant Shah.

This was published in a book on Palestinian art.

The rise of mobile media is heralding new forms of networked visualities. These visualities see place, politics and images entangled in new ways: what can be called ‘emplaced visuality’. In the images disseminated globally of citizen uprising such as the Arab Spring, it was mobile phones that provided the frame and context for new forms of networked visual politics. In the growth in networked photo apps such as Instagram and Hipstamic, how, when and why we are representing a relationship between place and co-presence is changing. No longer the poorer cousin to professional cameras, camera phones have lead the rise of do-it-yourself (DIY) aesthetics flooding mainstream and subcultural media cultures. In networked visuality contexts such as YouTube and Flickr, the aesthetic of what Burgess has called ‘vernacular creativity’[1] has become all-pervasive—so much so that even mainstream media borrows the DIY style.

Now, with locative media added into the equation, these visualities are not only networked but also emplaced—that is, entangled within the temporal and spatial movements of everyday life.[2]

Emplaced visualities represent a new relationship between place (as a series of what Doreen Massey calls ‘stories so far’)[3] co-presence, subjectivity and visuality. This phenomenon is impacting upon video art. In this chapter we reflect upon how mobile media visualities are impacting upon a sense of place and displacement. With the added dimension of Big Data and location-based services (like Google Maps and Facebook Places) now becoming part of the everyday informational circuits, how a sense of place and privacy is experienced and represented is changing. This phenomenon is apparent in the Palestinian cross-cultural video project called Al Jaar Qabla al Daar (The Neighbour before the House) as we will discuss in detail later in this chapter.

With its history of displacement and disapora, Palestinine’s role in contemporary art is increasingly becoming pivotal. This is especially the case with video art as a key medium for reflecting upon representations of place and movement. When we think of Palestinan video art the first artist we think of is Mona Hatoum. Hatoum was a poineer in so many ways. In particular, she gave voice to Arab women. Her work unsetttled the poetics of the everyday by evoking a sense of displacement and entanglement. While born in Beirut of Palestinan parents and then moving to London, she never identified as Lebanese. Despite never living in Palestinian, Hatoum was like a number of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon post 1948 who were never able to gain Lebanese identity cards. Unsurprisingly, Hatoum’s experiences of exile permulate her work. In particular, exile, politics and the body have played a key role. This is epitomised in her iconic Measures of Distance (1988) whereby Hatoum superimposes images of her mother having a shower with letters by her mum written in Arabian.

However, Hatoum is not the only artist representing the oevre of Palestinian video art. Over the last two decades—with the rise of mobile media affording easy accessibility to new media tools and networked contexts like YouTube—a new breed of video artists has arisen. An example is Navigations: Palestinian Video Art, 1988 to 2011 (curated as part of the Palestine Film Festival) that explored artists working in Palestine and the diaspora over nearly a quarter of a century. Unsurprisingly, motifs of diaspora and displacement feature throughout the fifteen works by Hatoum, Taysir Batniji, Manar Zoabi, Larissa Sansour and Khaled Jarrar to name a few. In Navigations: Palestinian Video Art key themes include ‘mobility and fluidity: the virtual and the real, the past and the future, the spectacular and the quotidian, the near and the far’.

Another example of an event promoting Palestinian video art is the /si:n/ Festival of Video Art & Performance. Consisting of performances, video installations, lectures, talks, and workshops in various venues all over the West Bank and includes artists from all over the world. The name /si:n/ is meant to linked the words ‘scene’ with ‘seen’ and has been seen as making an innovative context for video artists to share and collaborate in public venue. With themes such as ‘poetical revolution comes before political revolution’, the /si:n/ Festival provides a context that reflects upon exile and place in one of the most contested and politucal spaces, the West Bank. Beginning in 2009, the /si:n/ Festival became the first festival of video art in Palestine.

Given this rich tapestry of video art emerging in Palestine, in this chapter we explore the relationship between emergent mobile visualities, diaspora and place through a specific project called The Neighbour before the House. A cross-cultural video collaboration between Indian artists Shaina Anand, Ashok Sukumaran and Nida Ghouse, with Palestinian and Israeli artists Mahmoud Jiddah, Shereen Brakat and Mahasen Nasser-Eldin, The Neighbour before the House is a video art project that explores quotidian practices of life in a ‘post-surveillance society’. The Neighbour before the House is set in the context of the much contested territories and the relentless re-occupation and re-appropriation of East Jerusalem. Working with cheap surveillance technologies which have become such a ubiquitous part of the landscape of East Jerusalem, the artists use a PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom) security camera to inquire into the affective dimensions of ‘mobile’ life in the time of turbulent politics. The images that they capture look at jest, memory, desire and doubt, as fragile conditions of trust and life shape the everyday experiences of the region. The camera is given to the residents of a neighbourhood torn asunder by political strife and conflicts, asking them to search for the nugget of truth or morsel of thickness in the otherwise familiar flatness of walls and closed doors, which have been completely depleted of all depth because of the increased distance in the social relations.

The images eschew the tropes of traditional documentary making by and adopting the grainy, lo-res, digital non-frame, DIY aesthetics constantly in search of an image that might become the site of meaning making, but increasingly only capturing the mundane, the inane, the opaque and the evanescent. The image leads the commentary. The live camera operator’s interest and experience shape the image, rendering the familiar or the insignificant as hugely affective and evocative. The project further initiates a dialogue between the neighbours—both from across the contested zones, but also from across picket fences and walls of surveillance—by introducing the images to them, by inviting them to capture the images, and instil in them, the narratives of hope, despair, nostalgia, memory, loss, love, and longing.

The Neighbour before the House reflects upon the relationship between between art, technologies of visual reproduction and political strife. Moving away from the documentary style that has been popular in capturing the ‘real’, The Neighbour before the House refigures the temporality and spatiality through new affective and metaphorical tropes, playing with the tension between the presence of surveillance technologies and the familiarity of these images that breeds new conditions of life and living, trust and belonging, safety and threat, for people in Palestine. In the process, it introduces key questions to the role of the artist, the function of art, the form of video art practice, and the new negotiations that digital video apparatus introduce to the art worlds, beyond the now main-stream ideas of morphing, digitization, remixing etc.

Moreover, The Neighbour before the House reflects upon a shift away from the dominant network society paradigm and towards more contingent and ambivalent mirconarratives of camera phone practices. It toys with the DIY ‘banality’ aesthetics of camera phones in order to consider the ways in which place is overlaid with different types of information—electronic, geographic, psychological and metaphoric. On the one hand, The Neighbour before the House evokes network society metaphors. On the other hand, it suggests a move away from this paradigm and towards a politics of both ‘emplaced’ and displaced visuality. In order to discuss this transformation of the relationship between image, place and information from network society metaphors towards ‘emplaced’ visualities we firstly describe The Neighbour before the House before then reflecting upon a few key themes the project explores: that is, the movement of the networked society to emplaced visualities and the rise of the politics of the phoneur.

The Neighbour before the House 2012): A case study

As aforementioned, The Neighbor before the House is a collaborative video project between Indian, Israeli and Palestenian artists that appropriates, critically responds and insightfully rearranges the notion of art, politics and digital video technologies in its exploration of everyday practices of life in critical times in a networked post-surveillance society. The Neighbor before the House equips eight Palestenian families from East Jerusalem to be in control of PTZ (Pan Tilt Zoom) surveillance cameras mounted at strategic locations in the city, to observe the live feed on their TV sets, recording their reactions and live commentaries at what they see. Here the Big Brother, and its contemporary Big Data, is inverted through everyday citizens being given the omnipresent eye. It plays on the idea of the neighbour being both a friendly eye and when this watching shifts from being benevolent to malevolent.

As the artists write, ‘this footage shot with a security camera, takes us beyond the instrumental aspects of surveillance imaging, introducing us to the architecture of a deliberate and accelerated occupation of a city.’ Here the city is rendered into a cartography of informational circuits. Exploiting the conditions of networked spectacle, the project attempts to remap the real and the everyday through ‘inquisitiveness, jest, memory, fear, desire and doubt’. They use the surveillance cameras—symbols of suspicion and fear—to catalyse stories from Palestenians in different neighbourhoods about what can be seen: ‘messianic archeological digs; Israeli settlement activities; takeovers of Palestenian properties; the Old City, the Wall and the West Bank,’ among other mundane and marvellous details of living life in those precarious conditions.

Through the inversion of the politics of survellience from the Big Brother to the ubiquitous neighbour, The Neighbor before the House provides a rich, evocative and non-representational history of living in East Jerusalem. The networked media spectacles which have come to stand-in for the complex geo-political struggles of the region are displaced. As the low-res cameras reduce the deep geography into an alien flatness on the TV screens, as the camera captures glimpses of what could have been, records traces of blurred movements which require discussions and debates about their possible meaning, and engages the families to communicate their hopes, fears, desires and doubts, the art project also signals us to the new forms, functions and role of video art. Rather than the media event or spectacle,
The Neighbor before the House provides the micronarrative gestures of the everyday. The ways in which the place is a tapestery of subjectivities and experiences, not just a media spectacle.

As artist Shaina Anand mentions in an interview with Shah, this is a new kind of storytelling, where,

… a lot of the practice actually removes the filmmaker, the director, the auteur, and also therefore the cameraman, and also the lens... and offers these possibilities and privileges— of this look and gaze and all—to the subjects themselves[4]

And as the lens makes itself invisible, it also gives new importance to the apparatus of surveillance, seeing and its incorporation in our lives. As Florian Schenider mentions in the introduction to the project, the house upon which the camera is mounted, itself becomes a tripod made of stones. Instead of thinking of the video apparatus as out there, the private conditions of the home, the histories of the family, their relationships with neighbours and communities that they have lost, and strangers that they have inherited, all become the defining circumstances of this new crisis.

Borrowing from a Quranic saying, Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar, which is close to the idea of ‘loving they neighbour’ it explores how the presence of new digital video technologies establishes difference, distance, alienation, proximity, curiosity and surveillance which is not merely a function of governmental structures but also a condition of gamification and everyday engagement for the families in East Jerusalem. For the artists, this also takes up another connotation of ‘checking out your neighbour before you buy the house’ suggesting establishing bounded similarities to seek comfort. The edited footage of the video shows how and when the users got in control of the keyboard and a joy-stick, panning, tilting and zooming the camera, watching the live feeds on their Television sets as they speak live over the footage. These commentaries are personal as they are affective. Sometimes the commentary leads the person to probe the image, deeper, trying to find a meaning that can no longer be supported by the hyper-pixelated image on their screen, but becoming a site through which memories and interpretations

get generated. What begins as a playful probe soon takes up sinister shades, as some generate narratives of loss and death. Others take the opportunity to spy on the new settlers who have sometimes taken over their older houses, wondering what changes they are making to what was their own. There is a sense of rawness and urgency, as they look back, with fear, and anger, but also with resignation at the houses that they were evicted from, and the semblance of life that they can spot from their remote presence.

The final 5 cuts that the artist produce, give us a deep and evocative insight into geography, temporality, and the ways in which we can re-appropriate the network spectacle to look at things that are often forgotten, dropped out of, or rendered invisible in the neat and clean lines of network models and diagrams. The ‘footage’ quality of the probes, the long dwellings on insignificant images, and the panoptican nature of video as witness, video as spy, and video as affective engagement with territories and times that are lost, all give a new idea of what the future of video art would be like. Instead of looking at a tired old Foucauldian critique of surveillance, The Neighbor before the House posits the question of ‘Who watches the watchman?’ in ways that are both startling and assuring.

Visualising the Politics of the Network

One of the key themes of The Neighbour before the House is the changing role of the network society—especially in an age of Big Data and locative-based services (LBS)—whereby privacy and surveillance come to the forefront. The network society has often been cited as one of the defining frameworks of our heavily mediated times. From theorists such as Barry Wellman and Manuel Castells, the network metaphor has burgeoned in parallel with the all-pervasive rise of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) globally. According to Lee Raine and Wellman in Networked, the ‘new social operating systems of networked individualism liberates us from the restrictions of tightly knit groups.’[5]

Raine and Wellman argue that there has been a ‘triple revolution’: the rise of social networking, the capacity of the internet to empower individuals, and the always-on connectivity of mobile devices’.[6]

The ability of networks to explain a range of human personal and social relationships has afforded it great explanatory power, where everything (and hence, by association, everybody) can be understood and explained by the indexicalities and visual cartographies that networks produce. The network is simultaneously, and without any sense of irony, committed to both, examining sketchiness and producing clarity of any phenomena or relationality. The network presumes an externality which can be rich, chaotic and complex and proposes tools and models through which that diverse and discrete reality can be rendered intelligible by producing visualisations.

These visualisations are artefacts—in as much as all mapping exercises produce artefacts—and operate under the presumption of a benignity devoid of political interventions or intentions. The visualisations are non-representational, in terms that they do not seek to reproduce reality but actually understand it, and thereby shaping the lenses and tools to unravel the real nature of the Real. In this function, the network visualisations are akin to art, attaining symbolic value and attempting to decode a depth that the network itself defies and disowns, simulating conditions of knowing and exploring, emerging as surrogate structures that stand in for the real. Thus the rich set of actions, emotions, impulses, traces, inspirations, catalysts, memories, etc. get reified as transactions which can be sorted in indices, arranged in databases, and presented as an abstract, symbolic and hyper-visual reality which can now be consumed, accessed and archived within the network, thus obfuscating the reality that it was premised upon.

This phenomenon is what Shah calls the spectacle imperative of the network. Especially with the proliferation of ubiquitous image and video recording digital devices, this ability to create subjective, multiple, fractured spectacles that feed into the network’s own understanding of itself (rather than an engagement with a reality outside) has become the dominant aesthetic that travels from Reality TV programming to user generated content production on video distribution channels on the internet. This networked spectacle, without a single auteur or a concentrated intention—so the videos from the Arab Spring on YouTube, for example, range from small babies in prams to women forming barricades against a marching army, and from people giving out free food and water to acts of vandalism and petty thefts—has become the new aesthetic of video interaction, consumption and circulation. It invites an engagement, divesting our energies and attentions from the physical and the political, to the aesthetic and the discursive. Which is to say that when we consume these spectacles (or indeed, produce them, not necessarily only through the images but also through texts), we produce a parallel universe that demands that we understand the world ‘out there’ through these cultural artefacts which require an immense amount of decoding and meaning making. The network, in its turn, offers us better and more exhaustive tools of mining and sifting through this information, sorting and arranging it, curating and managing it, so that we build more efficient networks without essentially contributing to the on-the-ground action.

This peculiar self-sustaining selfish nature of the network, to become the only reality, under the guise of attempting to explain reality, is perhaps the most evident in times and geographies of crises. Where (and when) the conditions of politics, circumstances of everyday survival, and the algebra of quotidian life becomes too precarious, too wearisome, too unimaginable to cope with, the network spectacle appears as both the tool for governance as well as the site of protest. Hence, the same technologies are often used by people on different sides of the crises, to form negotiations and get a sense of control, on a reality that is quickly eluding their lived experiences. Surveillance cameras storing an incredible amount of visual data, forming banal narratives of the everyday, appear in critical times and geographies as symbols of control and containment, by authorities that seek to establish their sovereignty over unpredictable zones of public life and dwelling. The gaze of the authority is often criss-crossed by the cell-phone, the webcam, the tiny recording devices of everyday life that people on the streets and in their houses use, to record the nothingness of the crisis, the assurance of normalcy and the need to look over the shoulder and beyond the house, to know that whether or not god is in the heavens, all is well with the world.

The Place of the Visual: Towards a theory of emplaced visuality

However, with the rise of mobile media and its micronarrative capacity, the politics of network, and its relationship to a sense of place changes. Far from eroding a sense of place in the growing unboundness of home, mobile technologies reinforce the significance locality.[7] Mobile media also signal a move away from earlier depictions of the network society. Through the growth in camera phone practices overlaid with location-based services, we see new forms of visuality that reflect changing relations between place and information. With the rise of technologies in an increasingly mobile—physically and technologically—place has become progressively more contested. As Rowan Wilken and Gerard Goggin note in Mobile Technologies and Place, place is one of the most contested, ambiguous and complex terms today.[8] Viewing it as unbounded and relational, Wilken and Goggin observe, ‘place can be understood as all-pervasive in the way that it informs and shapes everyday lived experience—including how it is filtered and experienced via the use of mobile technologies’.[9] As social geographer Doreen Massey notes, maps provide little understanding into the complex elusiveness of place as a collection of ‘stories-so-far’:

One way of seeing ‘places’ is as on the surface of maps… But to escape from an imagination of space as surface is to abandon also that view of place. If space is rather a simultaneity of stories-so-far, then places are collections of those stories, articulations within the wider power-geometries of space. Their character will be a product of these intersections within that wider setting, and of what is made of them… And, too, of the non-meetings-up, the disconnections and the relations not established, the exclusions. All this contributes to the specificity of place.[10]

For anthropologist Sarah Pink, place is increasingly being mapped by practices of emplacement.[11] With location based media like Google Maps and geotagging becoming progressively part of everyday media practice, how place is imagined and experienced across geographic, psychological, online and offline spaces is changing. This impacts upon the role of ethnography and its relationship to geography and place. As Anne Beaulieu notes, ethnography has moved from co-location to co-presence.[12] In this shift, we see the role of ethnography to address the complex negotiations between online and offline spaces growing.

In The Neighbour before the House, we are made to consider the changing role of visuality in how place is experienced and practiced. By deploying a surveillant and multivalent gaze, The Neighbour before the House asks us to reconsider privacy and surviellance in an age of locative media. The rise of the network society has witnessed numerous tensions and ambivalence, especially around the the relationship between agency, information and place. This is epitomised by the second generation camera phones practices whereby with the added layer of LBS—where and when images were taken—becomes automatic by default. Whereas first generation of camera phone practices noted gendered differences.[13] through LBS, these differences take on new dimensions—particularly in terms of its potential ‘stalker’ elements.[14] While notions of privacy differ subject to socio-cultural context, LBS do provide more details about users and thus allow them to be victims of stalking (Cincotta, Ashford, & Michael 2011).

The shift towards second generation camera phone images sees a movement away from networked towards emplaced visualities (Pink & Hjorth 2012; Hjorth 2013; Hjorth & Arnold 2013). On the one hand, this overlaying of the geographic with the social highlights that place has always mattered to mobile media (Ito 2002; Hjorth 2005). Far from eroding place, mobile media amplify the complexities of place as something lived and imagined, geographic and yet psychological. LBS enable mobile media users to create and convey more complex details about a locality. On the other hand, LBS create new motivations for narrating a sense of place and the role of amateur and vernacular photography.

Shifts in contemporary amateur photography highlight the changes in how place, co-presence and information is navigated, performed and represented. This issues are particularly prevalent in contested location like Palestine. Last century it was the Kodak camera that epitomized amateur photography and played an important role in normalizing notions of the family as well as ritualizing events such as holidays.[15]

As Lisa Gye notes, personal photography is central to the process of identity formation and memorialization.[16] The shift towards camera phones not only changes how we capture, store, and disseminate images but also has ‘important repercussions for how we understand who we are and how we remember the past’.[17]

Moreover, with the rise in possibilities for sharing via social media like microblogs and Twitter, camera phone photography not only magnifies UCC, but also provides filters and lenses to enhance the “professional” and “artistic” dimensions of the photographic experience.[18]

For Daniel Palmer, smartphone photography is distinctive in various ways, with one key feature being the relationship between touch and the image in what he calls an ”embodied visual intimacy” (2012: 88). With the rise of high quality camera phones, along with the growth in distribution services via social and locative media, new forms of visuality are emerging (Pink & Hjorth 2012). The added dimensions of movement and touch becoming important features of the camera phone with the emphasis on networked is shifting to “emplaced” visuality. Images as emplaced in relation to what human geographer Tim Ingold has called a “meshwork” and entanglement of lines (2008). Images themselves are part of such lines as they are inextricable from the camera and person who took them. In this sense camera phone images are not simply about what they represent (although they are also about that) but are additionally about what is behind, above, below, and to either side.

By using different smartphone photo apps, respondents tried to inscribe a sense of place with emotion. This practice is what anthropologist Sarah Pink identifies as the “multisensorality of images.” That is, they are located in “the production and consumption of images as happening in movement, and consider them as components of configurations of place” (Pink 2011: 4). Drawing on Tim Ingold’s conceptualization of place as “entanglement” (Ingold 2008), Pink notes, “Thus, the ‘event’ where photographs are produced and consumed becomes not a meeting point in a network of connections but an intensity of entangled lines in movement… a meshwork of moving things” (Pink 2011: 8).

While the surveillant eye of Big Brother now takes the form of Big Data, the emplaced nature of camera phone images can help to contribute to a changing relationship between performativity, memory and place that is user-orientated. Rather than operating to memorialize place, camera phone practices, especially through LBS networks, are creating playful performances around the movement of co-presence, place and placing (Richardson & Wilken 2012). As noted elsewhere, Pink and Hjorth argue that camera phone practices are highlighting a move away from the network society towards emplaced visualities and socialities (2012). Emplaced visuality means understanding camera phone practices and the socialities that create and emerge through them in ways corresponding with non-representational (Thrift, 2008) or ‘more-than-representational’ approaches in geography which according to Hayden Lorimer encompass:

… how life takes shape and gains expression in shared experiences, everyday routines, fleeting encounters, embodied movements, precognitive triggers, affective intensities, enduring urges, unexceptional interactions and sensuous dispositions (Lorimer, 2005: 84).

Thus we see camera phone photography as a part of the flow of everyday life, an increasingly habitual way of being that is sensed and felt (emotionally and physically). Yet, because camera phone photography involves the production and sharing of images, it also compels us to engage with the relationship between the representational and the non-representational. Emplaced visualities see images as embedded with the movements of everyday life. Tim Cresswell has suggested that we consider ‘three aspects of mobility: the fact of physical movement—getting from one place to another; the representations of movement that give it shared meaning; and, finally, the experienced and embodied practice of movement’ (Cresswell, 2010: 19). These three aspects of mobility are deeply interwoven and entangled. In camera phone photography the experience and representation of camera phone photography is enacted in the ‘flow’ of everyday life at the interface where digital and material realities come together. These emplaced visualities are often abstracted through the mechanics of Big Data mega surveillance. But as The Neighbour before the House demonstrates, the perpetual movement of emplaced visualities is in sharp contrast with the unmoving, omipresent Big Data eye.

This contrast between the moving and unmoving, micro and macro information overlaid onto place can also be reflected as part of the shift from the flâneur to the phoneur. The notion of mobility—as a technology, cultural practice, geography and metaphor—has impacted upon the ways in which twenty-first century cartographies of the urban play out. Through the trope of mobility, and immobility, rather than overcoming all difference and distance, the significance of local is reinforced. While nineteenth-century narrations of the urban were symbolised by the visual economics of the flâneur, the twenty-first century wanderer of the informational city has been rendered what Robert Luke calls the phoneur. [19] The conceptual distance, and yet continuum, between the flâneur and the phoneur is marked by the paradigmatic shift of the urban as once a geospatial image of, and for, the bourgeoisie, as opposed to the phoneur which sees the city transformed into informational circuit in which the person is just a mere node with little agency. Beyond dystopian narrations about the role of technology in maintaining a sense of intimacy, community and place, we can find various ways in which the tenacity of the local retains control. In particular, through the tension between mobile media and Big Data, we can see how the local and the urban can be re-imagined in new ways.

The flâneur (or the wanderer of the modern city), best encapsulated by German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s discussion of Baudelaire’s painting, has been defined as an important symbol of Paris and modernity as it moved into nineteenth century urbanity. Thanks to the restructuring of one third of the small streets into boulevards by Baron Hausmann, Paris of the nineteenth century took a new sense of place and space.

Luke’s phoneur, on the other hand, is the ‘user’ as as part of the informational network flows constituting contemporary urbanity. If the flâneur epitomised modernism and the rise of nineteenth-century urban, then for Luke, the phoneur is the twenty-first-century extension of this tradition as the icon of modernity. As Luke observes, in a networked city one is connected as part of circuit of information in which identity and privacy is at the mercy of system. The picture of the urban city today painted by Luke is one in which the individuals have minimal power in the rise of corporate surveillance.

Neighbour before the House problematises Luke’s dystopian view of the phoneur. The picture painted by Neighbour before the House is much more ambivalent. However it does make the audience reflect upon the changing nature of surveillance in an age of Big Data.[20]

These tensions around the dystopian phoneur and a more embodied and emplaced version can be found running as an undercurrent in the work of Neighbour before the House.

Conclusion

In this chapter we have explored the cross-cultural video collaboration, The Neighbour before the House, to consider the changing relationship between a sense of place, information and the politics of visuality. As we have suggested, with the rise of location-based camera phone practices and Big Data we are seeing new forms of visuality that are best described as emplaced rather than networked. The notion of emplaced reflects some of the tensions around contemporary representations of mobility and movement, particularly prevalent in the often displaced and diasporic experiences of Palestine.

Filmed in Palestine,The Neighbour before the House explores the notion of place as entangled and embedded at the same time as displaced through the rise of ICTs. By providing some of the paradoxes and ambivalences surrounding contemporary media practices and its relationship between information and place, it allows for a space for reflection and contemplation about the surveillence and privacy.

[1]. Jean Burgess, Vernacular creativity and new media (Doctoral dissertation), 2007. Retrieved from http://eprints.qut.edu.au/16378/

[2]. Sarah Pink and Larissa Hjorth Emplaced Cartographies: Reconceptualising camera phone practices in an age of locative media’, Media International Australia, 145 (2012): 145-156.

[3]. Doreen Massey

[4]. Shaina Anand interviewed by Nishant Shah, December 2012.

[5]. Raine, L. and B. Wellman 2012, Networked, Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press.

[6]. Ibid.

[7]. Mizuko Ito, ‘Mobiles and the Appropriation of Place’. Receiver 8, 2002, (consulted 5 December 2012) http://academic.evergreen.edu/curricular/evs/readings/itoShort.pdf ; Hjorth, L. (2005) ‘Locating Mobility: Practices of Co-Presence and the Persistence of the Postal Metaphor in SMS/MMS Mobile Phone Customization in Melbourne’, Fibreculture Journal, 6, (consulted 10 December 2006) http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue6/issue6_hjorth.html.

[8]. Rowan Wilken and Gerard Goggin, ‘Mobilizing Place: Conceptual Currents and Controversies’, in R. Wilken and G. Goggin (Eds) Mobile Technology and Place, New York, Routledge, 2012, pp. 3-25 (5).

[9].Ibid 6.

[10]. Doreen Massey,For Space, London, Sage, 2005 (130).

[11]. Sarah Pink, Doing Sensory Ethnography, London, Sage, 2009.

[12]. Anne Beaulieu, ‘From Co-location to Co-presence: Shifts in the Use of Ethnography for the Study of Knowledge’. Social Studies of Science, 40 (3) 2010: June. 453-470.

[13]. Dong-Hoo Lee, ‘Women’s creation of camera phone culture’. Fibreculture Journal 6, 2005, URL (consulted 3 February 2006) http://www.fibreculture.org/journal/issue6/issue6_donghoo_print.html; Larissa Hjorth, ‘Snapshots of almost contact’. Continuum, 21 (2) 2007: 227-238.

[14]. Alison Gazzard, ‘Location, Location, Location: Collecting Space and Place in Mobile Media’. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 17 (4) 2011: 405-417.

[15]. Lisa Gye, ‘Picture this: the impact of mobile camera phones on personal photographic practices,’ Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 21(2) 2007: 279–288.

[16]. Ibid 279.

[17]. Ibid 279.

[18]. Søren Mørk Petersen,Common Banality: The Affective Character of Photo Sharing, Everyday Life and Produsage Cultures, PhD Thesis, ITU Copenhagen.

[19]. Robert Luke, ‘The Phoneur: Mobile Commerce and the Digital Pedagogies of the Wireless Web’, in P. Trifonas (ed.) Communities of Difference: Culture, Language, Technology, pp. 185-204, Palgrave, London, 2006.

[20]. Sites such as www.pleaserobme.com, that seek to raise awareness about over-sharing of personal data, highlight not only the localised nature of privacy but also that privacy is something we do rather than something we possess.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/palestinian-video-art-larissa-hjorth-nishant-shah-video-games-a-case-study-of-cross-cultural-video-collaboration

Creative Activism - Voices of Young Change Makers in India (UDAAN)

denisse — 2015-04-14T13:21:22Z

This post is a short account of what happened at UDAAN in December 2013 — a conference that gathered 100 youth from across the country to discuss pressing environmental issues and creative strategies to tackle them. We conducted a survey to map the perspectives of these young change-makers and get a glimpse of how India's youth is now framing and going about making 'change'



CHANGE-MAKERS: Youth (India)

EVENT: UDAAN 2013 organized by 350 India: a global organization building grassroots movements across the country.

METHOD OF CHANGE: Behavioral change, solidarity networks and creative activism.

“Change or making change is to bring about a paradigm shift in the way we do certain things. To alter our general way of life as it remains now into something that is positive and ideal.”

This is one of the many responses we collected from UDAAN participants on what it means to make change in India today. So far, in previous articles, we have looked at organizations working with specific demographics and themes. On this opportunity, we are exploring the ideas behind a group conformed by individuals coming from different walks of life, who embody an array of historical, linguistic and cultural understandings of the world, yet still find an intersection at their intents for change. We addressed the core questions raised in the project's thought piece: Whose Change is it Anyway: “What is the understanding of change with which we were working? What are the kinds of changes being imagened? Whose change is it, anyway?” -to start touching base with the ideas underpinning their actions, and identify how -or whether- it introduces new ways to define this concept.

UDAAN 2013

I had the privilege of joining this inspiring group during a four day conference and got the opportunity to share with students, activists and entrepreneurs from 13 states of India (chosen from a pool of 2000 applicants) involved in social change practices across the country. Despite the diverging world views among participants, the sense of a common purpose was almost undisputed. Every attendee was committed to mitigate the detrimental impact of climate change in their cities, protect vulnerable populations and advocate for justice. However, the most interesting points of contention lied on how to translate this commitment into individual and collective action, create conditions that enable change, and encourage community participation in environmental, political and social issues.

With these questions in mind, the conference focused on providing strategies of action and the attendees explored all sorts of lobbying and political participation mechanisms through its workshops. Three main elements stood out for me. First, the cocktail of tactics provided by experienced campaigners: from direct resistance and non-violent action to story-telling and street theater; participants were inspired to experiment and re-conceptualize activism.

Space Theatre Ensemble

Educators Collective

Second, the use of gamification in the workshops, facilitated by the experiential learning group Educators Collective, was the key to introduce values of leadership, solidarity and sustainability into individual behaviour and team practices. And finally, the add of 'unconference slots' to the program empowered attendees to share their methods, initiatives and projects in an open platform. This fostered peer-to-peer learning and more importantly reinforced the net of support and the immense amount of admiration (that grew exponentially between participants) for each other's work.

Youth and Activism in India

Coming from the perspective of our research project: Making Change, it was second nature to me to question frameworks utilized around "making change". I was pleasantly surprised to find an array of perspectives and experiences floating around panels, workshops and keynote presentations. They were definitely seeking consensus, yet in a way that did not inhibit diversity of thought, intellectual curiosity and self-reflection. This sparked the idea of collecting these views and use them as a sample of the current status of youth activism in India. Particularly considering how many of the strategies taught at UDAAN, while incredibly powerful, require a set of resources (including capital, time and energy) that are not readily accessible for all aspiring activists in the country.

These thoughts are consistent with a couple of articles I referred to for context on Indian youth and activism. Starting with the IRIS Knowledge Foundation and the UN-HABITAT's report: "State of the Urban Youth, India 2012: Employment, Livelihoods, Skills". It states that in only seven years, India will become the youngest country of the world with a median age of 29 years old. This, coupled with the fact that India's youth is the largest group in the working-age population — in a country that is expected to become one of the world's next major economic powers (Ilavasaran, 2013) — has, according to Padma Prakash, led demographers and economists to consider youth as the future of the country's economic growth. Having said that, these promising prospects do not reflect that 87.2% of the unemployed of the country are youth, only 27% of Indian youth is literate and 64% is located in rural areas. These facts display a constant negotiation between precariousness and hope, and particularly the high level of dissonance between the expectations and opportunities surrounding this group. Furthermore, as put by Prakash, despite the amount of economic information we have on this group, we lack a deep understanding of the social constructs underpinning their motivations and actions. On one hand, Ilavasaran suggests precariousness is the trigger behind both their unrest and their activism. On the other, the path they end up taking will depend on how they understand making change and their role within this process.

This dilemma was quite evident at UDAAN. Youth from all over India came together to fervently speak about the grievances climate change is causing in their regions and share the stories behind their struggles. On this note, the conference represented an incubator for their ideas and frustrations. and one of its main goals was to steer all this energy towards a path of constructive positive change. Carpini on his work on civic engagement (2000) outlines three factors that lead to participation: motivation, opportunities and capabilities; and how the interplay of the three result in different patterns of change-making. Hence, what is left to answer is how will this chaotic ecosystem shape youth's ideas of creating change? And to what extent will these conditions determine their motivation, opportunities and capacities of participating in the process? The survey we sent out to participants is only a starting point to reflect on these points. It did not aim to resolve these questions, but instead gather a snapshot of how politically and socially active young citizens are locating change and framing some of the biggest challenges of its generation.

Online Survey

About 25 people participated in the survey. The survey had five questions that explored three concepts analyzed in the Making Change research project: change, civic engagement and methods of change. It was divided into three sections:

a) Definitions: Participants were asked how they understand 'change' and 'making change'.

b) Actors: Participants were asked to reflect on their role and the role of youth in the process of making change. It also touched on concepts of active citizenship and engagement.

c) Methods: This section looked at the practices and methods preferred by youth for making change. Participants were asked to think about strategies and tactics discussed at the UDAAN workshops or other initiatives of interest, and how ICT/technology affect the process.

The purpose was to collate as many ideas and perspectives around change-making from this group and hence, the questions were broad and open-ended. The participants remained anonymous and details about their age, religion, region, socio-economic status, etc., were not disclosed. The language barrier and access (and frequency of access) to social media platforms was a big limitation to obtain a larger sample but the responses still reflected interesting patterns, which were later classified and categorized using a keyword system.

The results were displayed on the info-graphics found below:

Infographic 1* reflects the different ways participants outlined change-making: definitions of 'change' and 'making change', type of change (positive, neutral or confrontational), location of change (individual, society or system) and time of change (now, future, long-term).
Infographics 2* and 3 outline the profiles of a change-maker and an active citizen.
Infographic 4 lists their preferred methods of change -in no particular order. The bottom section reflects the spectrum of opinions around the use of technology.

*The percentages reflect the portion of respondents who reflected this view and the texts are excerpts of the respondents' answers.

This presentation format was chosen for three reasons: first, to facilitate the consumption of raw data collected from the survey and make visual associations between themes. Second, to put into practice some the recommendations from the storytelling workshop to make research more accessible to the public. And third, as a somewhat self-serving experiment to measure a) the ability of a graphic designer rookie, with no previous experience (like me), to create visual aids and graphics with free online tools, and b) explore empirically some of the methods I have encountered through my research: Methods for Social Change. Hence, the following results will not be of an academic nature as previous posts, but will instead clarify some of the patterns, evident in the original responses, that may have been lost in graphic translation.

Locating Change: Definitions

"Change is any alteration from an established status-quo. Making change is creating a system that is self-sustaining and capable of surviving over a long period of time"

In spite of including both concepts on the same question, most respondents differentiated them in their answers. Approximately 50% of the sample responded 'change' was either an irreversible process or an outcome to a process, while the other 50% implicated themselves in the 'change' process, stating it means to shift and modify how we act and think. A similar spirit was reflected about 'making change'. About 29% of the participants acknowledges a break from previous practices, and 29% considers we are implicated through the adoption of a new model of action. Interestingly enough, only 5% considers making change a duty or a responsibility. This low percentage signals making change is understood as non-compulsory which does not affect active politically involved citizens but leaves the more passive and idle off the hook when it comes to acknowledging their role in the process of change.

Moving on to type of change: 38% of the respondents consider making change a neutral process that does not guarantee a positive change (as considered by 33% of the sample). It was defined as an event that merely breaks the norm or from usual practices. A possible reading of this is that a group is not mobilizing its efforts with a plausible positive alternative in mind. Instead, it seeks difference without a deeper considerations of how will it differ from the conditions it is breaking from. This fits into the 'politics of hope' paradigm brought up by Shah in the piece: This approach to change and the idiom 'making a difference' is "so infused with the joy of possibilities" that it doesn't evaluate whether the outcome will lead to further assurance or precariousness, when compared to the earlier structure. This approach limits structural, systemic and sustainable change, an issue that was also evident in the results of the time-line. 0% thinks change must be made immediately but the rest of the sample was divided into making plans for the future (19%) and a smaller number on securing a self-sustaining system (10%) to replace the former.

Infographic 1: Making Change (Generated using: easel.ly-)

Finally, on the question of where is change located, we find the first instance of a pattern that was evident throughout the survey. On this category 38% finds change must occur externally: either in society and others (19%), or through the shift from a status quo that is perpetuating inequality (19%). Yet the largest group (24%) identified that change must occur internally first. The role of the self was also very prominent in the following sections as well.

Agents of Change

After locating change, the project also intends to understand who are the main actors and stakeholders lumped into the category of 'citizen' or 'citizen action'. On this survey, these actors were dubbed 'change-makers'. Respondents were free to describe what they understood by the term and the social construct determining the model they were working towards (as aspiring change-makers themselves). The second actor we inquired about was 'active citizen'. The concept of citizenship is ambiguous terrain, yet there seems to be a connection between the identity confered by the 'citizen' status and the respondents' inner call for action.

a) The Change-Maker:

"I think that all of us can be change-makers. We need to be sure of what and why we need to change and have a vision of how the world will be after making the change"

The Change-Maker (Infographic 2) was defined by the four characteristics outlined below.

Infographic 2: The Change Maker (Generated using: easel.ly )

Each characteristic was coupled by actions that reinforce this behaviour. For example, understanding the issue (33%) comes hand-in-hand with inciting motivation through information: 'If one aspires to change, then one must first understand what is to be changed, how it is to be changed and what would replace the changed system. The primary step is to realize and acknowledge the problem, educate others and then action” (Anonymous survey respondent, 2013) Another interesting example is how the 28% that identified the individual as the source of change, also recommend self-reflection on how to create the most impact: "[My role as a change-maker is] practicing what I preach and learning to critique myself constructively and in a manner that helps me improve" (Anonymous survey respondent, 2013) This brings a different light to Carpinis categorization of 'capabilities' in social change. It is no longer about participation in an external movement but more about how the individual secures sustained change through his own consistent and coherent behaviour.

b) The Active Citizen

"An active citizen is who follows the constitution, understands and takes responsibility for himself and for influencing his family and community for the betterment of life's social, economic and environmental issues"

Self-awareness was a key point in how the active citizen was personified. It was one of most emphasized points, placing more responsibility on the role of the citizen as opposed to on the issue at hand. Attitudes such as 'realizing the problem', 'taking responsibility' and 'taking initiative' reflect that the individual is finding motivation on taking ownership of his choices and decision-making power. The individual is focusing less on antagonizing the structure and is instead elevating his identity to a fearless, noble status -the citizen is becoming the hero of its own narrative. This ego-emphasis, is also motivating the citizen to invest on increasing its own knowledge capital and attain a thorough understanding of the issues, to then heighten individual and collective awareness around them. The objective is either local -give back to its community- or normative -work towards justice and equity- but there seems to be consensus on the starting point.

Infographic 3 - The Active Citizen (Generated using: easel.ly)

Methods for Change

“By going out there and making the change! Get down and dirty. Then use those examples in the form of story, pictures, etc. and inspire others around you to first change themselves and then help change society!”

Finally, infographic 4 displays a mapping of the methods brought up by participants. Again, awareness and behavioural change were the most popular, placing information and the individual at the epicenter of change-making. The impact of the theater and story telling workshops on participants was also evident, on several mentions to the power of 'artivism'.

Infographic 4: Methods for Social Change (Generated using: easel.ly )

In regards to communication and technology, I was surprised to find that many respondents find it insufficient. They instead recognize the need for strong offline communities making sure activism online translates into the offline realm. “[online platforms] are vital in building quick connections amongst those who feel alike towards bringing change. But eventually, all struggles for change have to be offline [...] technology could be the first step that eventually leads the path to more offline and personal connections.”(Anonymous survey respondent, 2013) : Others were wary about its power and they recognize it can be used to both help and contain the activist with the same intensity: "Technology can either blind people or give them sight."(Anonymous survey respondent, 2013) These views reflect youth has moved on from the tech hype that pervades the digital activism discourse. The role of technology was not excluded from the conference's tactic package and the group perceives technology as a powerful complement, yet it still places a lot more emphasis on creating sustainable change through education, behaviour and offline interactions than through digital interventions.

Conclusion

Comments at the aftermath of the event reflected participants had undergone a collective mental shift on how to create social change. We arrived looking outwards: accustomed to pointing fingers and scouting for common enemies that personify the misdoings of inequality perpetrators. Five days at Fireflies later and after UDAAN's intervention, I can safely say we left looking inwards. We are now determined to seek information and identify the most effective ways to mainstream it and make it accessible; we are impelled to reconnect with our creative and artistic selves and put them at service of communication; we are encouraged to share our personal stories and have them inspire solidarity and movement in our communities, and above all, we will continue to pursue the level of behaviour-action consistency that legitimizes our efforts at making change. The conference turned out to be a very organic experience and it provided all of us with a space to connect with ourselves and one another in a time of growing loneliness and isolation in the digital age.

Furthermore, the thoughts that surfaced on the survey are important pointers to continue uncovering what drives civic engagement among youth. Seeing these activists locate change in the self was a refreshing break from the times we used to overindulge in the possibilities of technology-mediated change. It seems that the digital is already so embedded in our interactions and ecosystems that it has not only has ceased to be novel, but it is recognized as insufficent, and hence, the attention has returned back to the user and its offline communities. With this in mind, the group that attended UDAAN, as part of the demographic who represents "the promise and future of India's growth", is taking up the challenge of strengthening ideas of making change in their networks. Have them succeed, and this 'growth' will be met by a current of better informed, better armed young activists working to secure a self-sustaining system for the generations to come.

** Thanks to everyone who participated on the survey, Special mention to UDAAN organizers, Educators Collective and the wonderful UDAAN 2013 group**

Sources:

HABITAT, UN. "State of the Urban Youth, India 2012.", (2013)
Ilavarasan, P. Vigneswara. "Community work and limited online activism among India youth." International Communication Gazette 75, no. 3 (2013): 284-299.
Shah, Nishant “Whose Change is it Anyways? Hivos Knowledge Program. (April 30, 2013).

Resources:

Easel.ly: To create and share visual ideas online: www.easel.ly/‎
Info.gram: Create infographics: infogr.am
More on UDAAN: http://world.350.org/udaan/
More on Global Power Shift (350) - http://globalpowershift.org/

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/young-voices-udaan

Internet Monitor

praskrishna — 2014-01-09T07:33:02Z

Malavika's piece on India's Identity Crisis is published in this report.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/internet-monitor-2013.pdf

Reclaim Open Learning Symposium

praskrishna — 2013-09-30T10:44:39Z

This international convening is the culmination of the Reclaim Open Learning Innovation Challenge, committed to surfacing individuals and organizations that are transforming higher education toward connected and creative learning, open in content and access, participatory, and building on a growing range of experiments and innovations in networked learning. Nishant Shah is giving a talk at this event.

Note: The event is free and open to the public. Click to read the original published by DML Research Hub. This event is sponsored and organized by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, University of California Humanities Research Institute, located at UC Irvine and is co-sponsored by the MIT Media Lab and CALit2.

A Live recording of the panel discussion here.

Please feel free to follow the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #ReclaimOpen. Certain portions of the Reclaim Open Learning Symposium will be streaming live via the DML Research Hub's YouTube Channel. Please click on the "streaming live" links below for more info. All times listed below are Pacific Time.

September 26, 2013

5:00 PM (CALit2 Auditorium + streaming live)

Welcome to Calit2 by G.P.Li and to the symposium by David Theo Goldberg

Opening Keynote Event - Conversation with John Seely Brown and Amin Saberi, moderated by Anya Kamenetz

Scientist, artist and strategist, for two decades the head of Xerox PARC, one of the country’s most innovative places, JSB is hailed as one of the premier minds bent to the work of understanding how learning evolves in a connected age. He’ll be talking with Amin Saberi, a professor of management science, computational and mathematical engineering at Stanford, and now the CEO of NovoEd, a MOOC startup offering courses from some of the world’s top business schools with the novel inclusion of small group, real-world collaborative project-based learning. Some questions we’ll take on: where are we in the MOOC hype cycle, and does it matter? What are the relative strengths and weaknesses of online and offline interaction for learning?

7:30 PM (CALit2 Atrium)

Gathering - Reclaim Open Learning Reception

We invite you to join us in celebrating the opening of the Reclaim Open Learning Symposium following the Conversation with John Seely Brown and Amin Saberi

September 27, 2013

9:00 AM - 10:00 AM (CALit2 Atrium)

Reclaim Open Learning Demos + Continental Breakfast

10:00 AM - 11:00 AM (CALit2 Auditorium + streaming live)

Reclaiming Open Learning--A Stake in the Ground

John Seely Brown, Nishant Shah, and Philipp Schmidt (Moderator)

What values are we articulating? Why does open learning matter? What is it “good for”? What are the stakes?

11:00 AM - 3:00 PM (CALit2, Room 3008)

Working Group - Reclaim Open Learning: The COURSE

Howard Rheingold

We will work all day to create a distributed multimedia open course on Reclaiming Open Learning, hacking together a syllabus, activities, assignments, competencies, and more across platforms.

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM (CALit2 Auditorium + streaming live)

Connected Learning, Digital Arts and Humanities

Susie Ferrell, Jade Ulrich, Martha Burtis, Alan Levine, Jonathan Worth, and Liz Losh (Moderator)

Why is art important in an online learning world sometimes dominated by STEM? how does the media production of learners get facilitated and managed in distributed networks and large-scale?

12:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Break for Lunch

2:00 PM - 3:00 PM (CALit2 Auditorium + streaming live)

The Warm Body Effect

Josie Fraser, Freeman Murray and Anya Kamenetz (Moderator)

Space, place, and collocation -- what do physical presence, local communities and live social interaction mean for learners connected by the web? What power relationships and hierarchies are implied/facilitated by openness?

3:00 PM - 4:00 PM (CALit2 Auditorium + streaming live)

Contexts & Outcomes

Howard Rheingold, Anya Kamenetz, and Mimi Ito (Moderator)

What are the broader social and economic contexts in which open learning is happening? How do questions of value and quality get negotiated? How do we define success?

4:00 PM - 4:30 PM (CALit2 Auditorium + streaming live)

Presentation from 'Reclaim Open Learning: The COURSE'

Howard Rheingold

The working group will present their course.

4:30 PM - 5:00 PM (CALit2 Auditorium + streaming live)

Closing Remarks

David Theo Goldberg

Winners

DigiLit Leicester www.digilitleic.com | Josie Fraser (Leicester City Council), Lucy Atkins (Leicester City Council), Richard Hall (De Montfort University)

This distributed course has a local aim: increasing the ability of local teachers in Leicester to use connected learning methods to support teaching and transform learning.

Digital Storytelling 106 (DS106) ds106.us | Jim Groom, Martha Buris, Alan Levine, University of Mary Washington, United States

Based on the principle “a domain of one’s own,” Groom’s course connects registered students and open participants in an ever-evolving online community where they submit, complete and collaborate on assignments in writing, mash-ups, design, video, audio, and other media. DS106 lives online as a livestreaming radio station, a sub-reddit, a G+ group, a Twitter feed, and more.

FemTechNet femtechnet.blogspot.com | Susanna Ferrell, Jade Ulrich Scripps College, United States

FemTechNet bills itself as the first “distributed online collaborative course.” In their beta outing, students applied feminist texts to labor, digital art, and archives, drawing connections between the dichotomies of software/hardware and feminism/masculinity. They edited Wikipedia, created sculptures and images and held dialogues with others of diverse backgrounds. The course is expanding globally.

Jaaga Study jaaga.in/study | Archana Prasad, Freeman Murray, India

Jaaga is a multidisciplinary creative hub in Bangalore, India. They are piloting informal learning programs leveraging MOOC resources with volunteer facilitators in a face to face community setting, with the goal of creating market-ready computer programmers.

Photography BA Hons and Phonar-Ed www.phonar.covmedia.co.uk | Jonathan Worth, Matt Johnston, Shaun Hides, Jonathan Shaw, Coventry University, UK; David Kernohan, JISC, UK

These free and open photography classes are available in app form and deal directly with the nature of the photographer as publisher. Classroom-based but leveraging various online communities, they are expanding to a full master’s and bachelor’s program.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/dml-hub-reclaim-open-learning-symposium

Digital Humanities for Indian Higher Education

Sara Morais and Subhashish Panigrahi — 2015-04-17T10:53:17Z

The digital age has had a huge impact on higher education in the last decade transforming the modalities of both teaching and research. To discuss these changes and what it means for research work, a multidisciplinary consultation was held at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore on July 13, 2013.

Hosted by HEIRA, CSCS, Tumkur University, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai the Center for Cultural Studies (CCS) and Access To Knowledge Programme of Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), the consultation addressed what it meant to be a Digital Humanities researcher and how to curricularize something that refuses to confine itself to disciplinary boundaries. The introduction note had Tejaswini Niranjana of HEIRA-CSCS & TISS speak of the promise of free and democratic education on the Internet, which had so far failed in a sense that scholarship was having difficulties with justifying work produced online. Especially in India the question of integrating scientific work in local languages was of importance, as mainly research is happening in and for the English-speaking world.

However, as Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, Access to Knowledge at CIS pointed out when taking over the second part of the introduction, projects like the Indian language Wikipedia project are making an attempt to fill that gap. One of the key aspects to digital humanities is that knowledge should be free and open source and providing Wikipedia in Indian languages is a step towards more accessibility. Of course the field is not easy to define. The digital humanities embrace everything technological, which means that often one could be doing digital humanities work without actually realizing it, as Vishnu Vardhan exemplified with the media archive work he had been doing before the term "digital humanities" was properly coined.

This example serves for one of the many ways in which digital humanities is work that involves not just reading theory but actually "building", as Stephen Ramsay had called it. As has been hinted at in the previous blog posts on digital humanities, this calls for a new set of tools and skill sets for students entering the "field". Again, there is little clarity on whether or not the digital humanities can be seen as a field, however, for the sake of simplicity, I address it as one. It should be stated, though, that this field does not have the classical confines and closed boundaries of disciplines, but is conceived as an open, ever-changing space in which work is being done in a trans-disciplinarily way. Within this field, new questions arise: What exactly is this producing? Is the archive the number one research output? And if yes, what does that mean for the humanities field? As the way archives are produced influences the very content of knowledge, digital technologies being implemented must have an impact on today's knowledge inventory. Passing knowledge and improving scholarship is therefore an important factor for accessibility and an equalizing societal factor.

In the first session of the day Amlan Dasgupta from Jadavpur University, Kolkata addressed the problems of curricularising digital humanities. As it is a field that deals with contemporary social factors, which are ever-changing, it is difficult to set up a course much in advance, which will match the expectations it produces. Nonetheless, the instability of digital platforms is not only negative. While a course should have a certainty about what it needs to deliver, the openness of digital humanities seminars enable venturing into unknown research territory with possibly unpredictable and therefore fruitful outcome. While the internet suggests a world wide collaboration possibility, little research is being done in local Indian languages, as optical character recognition is a problem online. Which is why India has experienced what Dasgupta calls an 'archiving moment', several older texts and research work are being digitally archived so as to make them more accessible and increase the native language portfolio. This is part of what can be called the first wave of digital humanities, where mainly non-digital material are transferred into a field of digital operability.

The so-called second wave of digital humanities focused on things "born" digital, inherently digital experiences, like computer games, 3D modeling, GIS mapping and digital surrogates. In the digital age, all cultural experiences have a digital part. While aforementioned categories are purely digital, cultural and societal objects are not necessarily that easily defined. We are experiencing the merge of the digital and analog, it is impossible to think the one without the other. This is where the digital humanities step in, as they are not only about using these experiences, but actually about making them. Therefore, the field could be about evolving tools, free and open-source tools, which ensure access, build databases and create metadata. It is essential that one develops ones own methods and tools to do digital humanities work. Metadata should be community held and a collaborative process, not only to include many voices but also because authorship is evolving and there is no one single heroic individual who processes data.

	Ravi Sundaram from Sarai programme at the Centre for the Study of Devloping Society added to that in his talk about intimating the archives by expressing the importance of digitizing the Indian labour archive, calling it one of the important 'doings' of digital humanities. The so-called third wave of digital humanities takes the computational turn for granted and makes big data the rhetoric of the present. Within the digital, a post-device landscape has evolved, which means that objects are dematerialized. The unanswered question is what exactly that means for the user. Squndaram introduces a Sarai-CSDS project, in which the job was not providing access, but publishing online without copyright and
therefore generating knowledge, which could be used and transformed according to will and purpose. This happened via bilingual mailinglists even before a designed and visual interface was possible online. In this way, there was a world-wide connection of people doing research work. The information was curated via a peer-review system, which, too, has become an important methodology for digital humanities work. The Sarai archive project has taken it upon itself to curate live digital humanities projects, allowing anyone to post online, from the working class to academic people, in English and Hindi. As publications are more and more taking place online, languages are formed by the gadgets and media that are used to produce them. The digital, as well as literature are being inhabited by multiple authorships and scholarly activity must develop to accommodate these circumstances. Text is being produced on mobile phones and no longer necessarily conforms to classroom rules. Therefore, being a digital humanist includes the attempt to overcome the crisis traditional humanities encounter in the classroom.

Ravi Sundaram from Sarai programme at the Centre for the Study of Devloping Society added to that in his talk about intimating the archives by expressing the importance of digitizing the Indian labour archive, calling it one of the important 'doings' of digital humanities. The so-called third wave of digital humanities takes the computational turn for granted and makes big data the rhetoric of the present. Within the digital, a post-device landscape has evolved, which means that objects are dematerialized. The unanswered question is what exactly that means for the user. Squndaram introduces a Sarai-CSDS project, in which the job was not providing access, but publishing online without copyright and

therefore generating knowledge, which could be used and transformed according to will and purpose. This happened via bilingual mailinglists even before a designed and visual interface was possible online. In this way, there was a world-wide connection of people doing research work. The information was curated via a peer-review system, which, too, has become an important methodology for digital humanities work. The Sarai archive project has taken it upon itself to curate live digital humanities projects, allowing anyone to post online, from the working class to academic people, in English and Hindi. As publications are more and more taking place online, languages are formed by the gadgets and media that are used to produce them. The digital, as well as literature are being inhabited by multiple authorships and scholarly activity must develop to accommodate these circumstances. Text is being produced on mobile phones and no longer necessarily conforms to classroom rules. Therefore, being a digital humanist includes the attempt to overcome the crisis traditional humanities encounter in the classroom.

Nishant Shah, joining in on Skype in digital humanities manner, explained his first encounter with digital humanities arising the hopes of his science fiction dreams finally coming true. The encountered reality, however, faces many challenges amidst the number of possibilities it brings. Digital humanities are complex as the field incorporates the object of study, just as it uses it as a methodology. As it uses the very tools and methods which define its existence, questions of humanities scholarship are getting reframed. Digital humanities rephrase questions of the social, cultural and political, making them more and more about infrastructure, turning the information society mainly into a data society. The critical skills of human intervention are now being replaced by new skills required in the time of data. This leads to a naturalization of data, which carries the danger of seeing knowledge once again as a given. As was explained in the last blog post, data is just as subjective as information and hiding this factor by neutralization and naturalization is a concern digital humanities need to address, as data has now become a structural component of being. When it was just information we were talking about, it was easy to distinguish between information and reality, as information was about reality. With data, however, this distinction is no longer possible as the data produces a reality. Therefore, data is a metaphor, which stands for the structure of our experiences. The problem is that most of the data being created is invisible to the human. What we post, blog or tweet creates a lot more behind the surface of computer interfaces. Facebook is not information technology like cinema was. It produces data which is not for human consumption, namely algorithms, which are read only by artificial computer programs. We are in the service of producing data which cannot be neutral as we can not read it. In this way data dislocates the human and traditional humanities work is no longer sufficient. So in digital humanities work we need to see what it cannot reflect. How do we translate humanities political idea to data management? This implies that digital humanities are not a continuum from traditional humanities, as digital humanities challenges aspects of humanities skills and beliefs. However, this does not mean that humanities have become dispensable. In fact humanities and digital humanities should not compete with, but add to each other. So the thought process should not be what the digital can do for the humanities, but what the two fields could do for each other.

Returning to scholarship, Tanveer Hasan and Sneha PP introduced the Pathways to Higher Education project they had been working on, which focuses on language and technology in the undergraduate space. The aim of the project is to improve the quality of access in higher education and focused on the linguistic and digital divide in India. Workshops were organized on social change and collaborative learning, in which students could look at technology not just as a tool but also as a form of political and critical engagement, raising the question of how that defines the way someone looks at a project. As students are stakeholders in knowledge production, their input is much required and forms academia. There seems to be the perception that the digital is only for a certain group of people and predominantly produced in english. However, the course of the project showed that the digital can be produced in alternative, non-hegemonial spaces and realities. Digital platforms join debates based on global and local knowledges, so it is vital to employ them so as to strengthen community knowledge. However, digital debates are not easily accepted in the classroom, as social media platforms like Facebook are frowned upon by teachers, who see them only as a socializing tool. One of the challenges digital humanities face therefore surely is the skepticism it receives upon trying to produce knowledge outside of classical academic institutions. Related to this the question arose on how this 'doing' in digital spaces translates into 'learning' in an academic sense. Many of the scholars in the project were very happy to produce visual material. However, when they were asked to write in their local languages, text production was reluctant or not happening at all. One suggestion the project made to this was to stop devaluating Wikipedia as a source and scholarly tool, and instead to get students to contribute to its knowledge repositories as it is included in academia.

Video

In a session of participants responding to the presentations, many anxieties in doing digital humanities was addressed. A fear was voiced that digitization might be destroying archives, just as it attempted to reconfigure them. The relationship with text was becoming more difficult, as digital humanities tend to reject written work, feeling it was becoming more and more of just an add-on, which felt artificial. This could result in an analytic vs. artistic divide and the question formed was how to play with text in digital humanities work in a less frontal and confrontational manner.

It was noted that even as data is becoming synonymous with reality, interpretational challenges persevere. Entering a google search query can generate meaning, however its outcome is obscured by algorithms. A difficulty, especially in India, is that databases are only being implemented in a low percentage, once they are produced. So creating data is not enough to overcome knowledge gaps. Digital humanities are faced with the challenge of making information and data literacy increase. This needs to happen in collaboration with governmental organs, as India's government has difficulties with patent licenses and digital rights. As the perception remains that the digital is natively english-speaking, less value is given to resource material in local languages. As all computer updates, etc., run in english language, the fact that knowledge can and should be produced in one's own native language is obscured.

The expressive potential of these minority languages is therefore decreasing, a matter of concern for Indian academia. Knowledge production of educational material must be included into scholarly work, to work against this decline. In this sense, the importance of the community was addressed. When experimenting with tools and technology, it is vital to exchange experiences and build a communal exchange. However, it was lamented that often ICT courses remain at a basic office-tools level. The content of digital humanities work cannot remain at a simplistic level but must include values and methods which go into greater detail and implement guerrilla methods. If we are not able to articulate a way of understanding the problem through these contexts, what is the good in sources of voices? The fear is that digital humanities is undergoing a shift from representation to segregation of knowledge repositories.

The digital age does not only influence knowledge repositories in the academic sense. In his talk, Ashish Rajadhyaksha describes the political perspective of digital humanities by the example of the UID project in India as something that has inhabited the digital ecosystem. Within the digital, what used to be public space is now perceived more as public domain – a trend towards making data compulsory. As one can see with UID and the condition of transfer from a state to an e-state in which India seems to find itself, forced digitization can increase the digital divide and marginalize certain groups of people. Rajadhyaksha's "Identity Project" looks at what it means to have a digital identity and how it can occupy space within digital ecosystems. This project is transparently documented under Pad.ma, encouraging alternative publishing methods, such as QR-codes in text sequences leading to the video interviews they refer to. With this explosion of data being created, it should be considered that it impacts on personal views of privacy. One theory is that the anonymity rises in the sea of data, another could be that personal inhibition thresholds are lowered. It also gives rise to the question, what it means to have free digitization. As we can see with the example of google's data mining, free internet does not mean you are not paying in some way. Apart from the data you provide in exchange for online services, these are of course always gadget-based, forcing users to invest in new appliances. If digital humanities relies on the hardware and software of mainstream corporations, can it express capitalistic critique?

In several ways the answer to that question remains unclear. While traditional humanities addressed social inequalities and expressed critique, a technologized humanities concept has different aims, as Arun Menon of CSCS explains. Digital humanities has a scientific approach which does not reflect in humanities work. The computational turn has taken scientific work towards an affirmative and essentialist perception of truth, which claims to be exact and precise. This is the crisis the humanities are facing and that require a reshaping of the new arising field that is the digital humanities in India. Menon believes that digital humanities does not have content per se, but works along the boundaries of the humanities and the sciences. In this sense it cannot be a discipline or a field of its own, but can address the gray areas being left out by other disciplines and create new research paradigms by co-opting humanities with sciences.

James Nye addressed the materiality of digital humanities by discussing what it meant to have and to hold them – materially and physically, as well as virtually. Physical resources are not enough but must be provided in local languages and virtual spaces. Good dictionaries are important resources for language knowledges not only on the basis of the commonest meaning but also its social connotations. The need is for librarianship to change to accommodate these diverse features.

The last presentation of the day had Souvik Mukherjee addressing the non-boundaries of digital humanities again, stressing the fact that the digital humanities did not exist. Rather, a multiplicity of digital humanities had arisen to incorporate topics like data mining, games studies, software studies and digital cultures. These study areas, rather than disciplines, are not always connected with concerns of humanities, but still make up a large part of digital humanities work. They, too, produce narratives as does any other research, however, often these narratives can be completely fictional and take place in digital realms. Facebook micro story telling serves as an example, just as gaming narratives do. While involved in gameplay, users create, read and write narratives as they play. At the same time they create identity and involvement, which can be diverse according to the digital space that identity is occupying. Therefore it definitely plays a part in deconstructing rigid ideas of identities. Tools like Poll Everywhere, Zotero or Posterous make academic work just as playful in a digital realm and create narratives similar to the ones in videogames as they construct an informational cloud on a discourse, which is not limited to ones immediate peers but invites a collaborative process. The suggestion is that discussions and research will remain fertile as long as they are not limited. Therefore digital humanities should be seen as an emerging field of enquiry rather than a discipline or even a non-discipline, embracing the intellectual culture of convergence that is happening online.

Summarizing the consultation, Ashwin Kumar articulated four rubrics under which the single presentations could be grouped. A large part of the presentations discussed digital humanities for and in pedagogy. These talks discussed what digital humanities was doing for the classroom, for teachers and teaching situations and academia in general. A second module saw digital humanities as a research modality and a tool developing discipline. The third rubric formed around seeing digital humanities as a new social skill, which enables a new way of sociality and mirrors society for it to be open for scrutiny. Another fourth rubric was around seeing the digital humanities as a new way of archiving, of storytelling and transmitting knowledge.

The question now is how to collaborate so as to take each of these areas forward and to evolve in the digital humanities under its redefined premisses. The data being produced cannot just be categorized and put on an x/y axis. So when humanities seems to have the systematic problem that it struggles to find the technology to accompany its work, for the digital humanities it seems to be the other way around. This implies a certain lack of content in digital humanities and it is a necessity to look beyond algorithms. The questions of digital humanities cannot simply be how many times a word comes up in a text. Digital humanities will generate this kind of enormous data which in itself is meaningless but will push us to ask the right questions. It will strengthen research by adding a new dimension to data. So anxieties about what it will do to the field are misplaced. Much more, the hope is that it will introduce new objects in questions on the paths we take to find new tools.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education

DML 2013 Conference

praskrishna — 2013-03-21T09:48:33Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/dml-2013-conference.pdf

Resisting Revolutions

praskrishna — 2012-05-29T10:28:17Z

Nishant Shah's peer reviewed journal article was published in Democracy, Volume 55, Issue 2.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/resisting-revolutions.pdf

GeekUp with Erica Hagen

praskrishna — 2012-02-29T03:00:14Z

HasGeek is organizing a GeekUp with Erica Hagen of the GroundTruth Initiative on 1 March 2012 at 5 p.m. Erica will speak on the theme: "From Information to Empowerment: Unpacking the Equation".

From Information to Empowerment to Unpacking the Equation

In 2010, Erica Hagen and Mikel Maron started GroundTruth Initiative to work towards empowering communities through open data, open information and participatory processes. Erica's and Mikel's work at GroundTruth is informed by their earlier experience of working with the Map Kibera project where they helped the youth and the communities in Kibera to map their geographies and represent information about themselves to the world through citizen media. In the process, Erica and Mikel uncovered several complex dynamics about self-representation by communities, what open data really means to communities and how they apply it to their circumstances, the dynamics between participatory development and participatory technologies, and the process of using community media tools and online methods for talking about issues that matter to them.

In this lecture, Erica Hagen will talk about her work with communities in Kenya, Jerusalem, Nigeria and other parts of the world through GroundTruth Initiative. Specifically, Erica will unpack the relationship between empowerment, information, and storytelling, and what both these elements mean to communities in different parts of the world. How are communities applying the information and data that they collect about their governments and themselves? What are the challenges involved in the process of working with open data, participatory processes and technologies? How can communities apply new media and data gathering tools to achieve local goals? What does empowerment mean in the face of the delicate lines and precariousness that communities and the interveners/practitioners have to tread in the process of data gathering, representation, communication and outputs?

Interested persons need to confirm attendance by registering at http://geekup.in/2012/erica-hagen

Erica Hagen

Erica Hagen is a journalist and international development practitioner working for democracy of information and citizen participation in both online and traditional media. She is the co-founder of Map Kibera and GroundTruth Initiative. Erica has worked in four countries on development communication and evaluation, and in the United States on refugee and immigrant issues, for organizations such as United Nations Population Fund, Concern Worldwide, and Unicef. She holds a Masters Degree in International Affairs from Columbia University, New York.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/geek-up-with-erica

Technology, Social Justice and Higher Education

praskrishna — 2015-03-30T14:54:21Z

Since the last two years, we at the Centre for Internet and Society, have been working with the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, on a project called Pathways to Higher Education, supported by the Ford Foundation.

The main aim of the project is to research the state of social diversity and justice in undergraduate colleges in India and encourage students to articulate the axes of discrimination and exclusion which might keep them from interacting and engaging with educational resources and systems in their college environments.

Peer-to-Peer Technologies

The entry point into these debates was digital technologies, where through an introduction to peer-to-peer technologies, digital story telling through various web based platforms, and a collaborative thought environment mediated by internet and digital technologies, we facilitated the students to identify, articulate and address questions of discrimination, change and the possibility of engaging with these critically in order to build a better learning environment for themselves (and their peers) in their own colleges.

Each workshop was designed not only to be sensitive to the specificities of the locations of the colleges, but also to accommodate for the needs, desires and aspirations of the students involved. The participants looked at their own personal, family and community histories, their everyday experiences, their affective modes of aspiration and desire, and their own circumstances which often circumscribe them, in order to come up with certain themes that they thought were relevant and crucial in their own contexts.

As a follow-up on the workshops, the students developed specific projects and activities that will help them strengthen their hypotheses by looking beyond the personal and finding ways by which they can engage with the larger communities, spreading awareness, building histories and acquiring skills to successfully bolster their classroom interaction and learning.

The following is a bird’s eye view of the key themes that have emerged in the workshops:

The Costs of Belonging

Almost unanimously, though articulating it in different ways, the students looked at different costs of belonging to a space. Sometimes it was the space of the web, sometimes of the larger educational institution, sometimes to distinct language groups which do not treat English as the lingua franca, and sometimes to communities and friend circles within the college environment.

It was particularly insightful for us to understand that granting access, providing infrastructure or equipping ‘underprivileged’ students with skills is not enough. In fact, it became apparent that there is a certain policy driven, post-Mandal affirmative action that has already bridged the infrastructural and access gap in the educational institutions. The easy availability of computers, internet access, the ubiquitous cell phone, were all indicators that for most of the students, it wasn’t a question of affording access. Even when we were dealing with economically disadvantaged students, there were a plethora of technology devices they had access to and familiarity with. Shared resources, public access to digital technologies, and institutional support towards promoting digital familiarity all played a significant role in demystifying the digital for them. In many ways, these students were digital natives if defined through access, because they had Facebook accounts and browsed Google to find everything they wanted. Their phone was an extension of their selves and they used it in creative ways to communicate and connect with their peers.

Based on this, the students are now prepared to work on documenting, exploring and raising awareness about these questions, to see what the gating factors are that disallow people with access to still feel excluded from the power of the digital.

The Need for Diversity

It is a telling sign about the state of the Internet in India that every student presumed that the only way to be really fluent with the digital web is to be fluent in English. The equation of English being synonymous with being online was both fascinating and troubling to us. Of course, a lot of it has to do with India’s own preoccupations, marked by a postcolonial subjectivity, with English as the language of modernity and privilege. But it also has to do with the fact that almost all things digital in India, lack localisation. The digital technologies and platforms remain almost exclusively in English, fostered by the fact that input devices (keyboards, for example) and display interfaces favour English as the language of computing.

Such an idea might also help in reducing the distance between those who can fluently navigate the web through its own language, and those who, through various reasons, find themselves tentative and intimidated online.

The breakthrough that the participants had, when they realised that they don’t have to be ‘proper in English’ while being online – the ability to find local language resources, fonts, translation machines, and the possibility of transliterating their local language in the Roman script was a learning lesson for us.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Learning

As a part of their orientation to the world of the digital, especially with the methodologies of the workshops, the students literally had an overnight epiphany where they could see the possibilities and potentials of P2P learning. The recognition that they are not merely recipients of knowledge but also bearers of experience and contexts which are rich and replete with knowledge, gave them new insights on how to approach learning and education. Through digital storytelling, the workshops demonstrated how, in our own stories and accounts of life, there are many indicators and factors which can help us engage with the realities of exclusion and injustice.

Working together in groups, not only to excavate knowledge from the outside, as it were, but also to unearth the knowledge, experience, stories, emotions that we all carry with ourselves and can serve as valuable tools to bring to the classroom, is a lesson that all the groups learned. The idea of a peer also led them to question the established hierarchies within formal education. What was particularly interesting was that they did not – as is often the case – translate P2P into DIY education. They recognised that there are certain knowledge and skill gaps that they would like experts to address and have incorporated special trainings with different experts in areas of language, communication, ethnography, interviews, film making, etc. However, the methods for these trainings are going to emphasise a more P2P structure that is different from the regular classroom learning.

What would happen if a teacher is looked at as a peer rather than a superior? How would they navigate curricula if the scope of their learning was greater than the curricula? How could they work together to learn from each other, different ways of learning and understanding? These are some of the questions that get reflected in their proposed campus activities, where they are trying to now produce knowledge about their communities, cities, families, groups and experiences, by conducting surveys, ethnographies, historical archive work, etc. The digital helps them in not only disseminating the information they are collecting but also in re-establishing their relationship with learning and knowledge.

Ideas like open space dialogues, collaborative story-telling, mobilising resources for knowledge production, creating awareness campaigns and interacting with a larger audience through the digital platforms are now a part of their proposals and promise to show some creative, innovative and interesting uses of these technologies. How the teachers would react to such an imagination of the students as peers within the formal education system, remains to be seen as we organise a faculty training workshop later in December.

These three large themes find different articulations, interpretations and executions in different locations. However, they seem to be emerging as the new forms of social exclusion that we need to take into account. It is apparent that the role of technologies – both at the level of usage and of imagination – is crucial in shaping these forms of social inequities. But the technologies can also facilitate negotiations and engagements with these concerns by providing new forms of knowledge production and pedagogy, which can help the students in developing better learning environments and processes. The Pathways to Higher Education remains committed to not only documenting these learnings but also to see how they might be upscaled and integrated into mainstream learning within higher education in India.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/higher-education

Between the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism

nishant — 2015-05-14T12:14:04Z

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

Context

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snapshots

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

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

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

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

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

Propositions

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

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

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

About the Authors

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

End Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Between the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism

nishant — 2015-10-25T05:58:59Z

Cross-posted from Democracy and Society.

Introduction

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

Context

Snapshots

Propositions

About the Authors

References

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

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

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

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

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

End Notes

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

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

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

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

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

Who the Hack?

praskrishna — 2015-05-14T12:16:59Z

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

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

Hackers v/s Crackers

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

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

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

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

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

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

See the original article published by the Indian Express here

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

Lives suspended in the Web

praskrishna — 2011-04-01T15:45:39Z

When 14-year-old Manish sits behind his laptop, punching away at keys, his facial expressions reflecting his various online interactions, his parents stand in the doorway, watching curiously. Their son is physically at home, but to all purposes, lost in the limbo of the Internet. By all standards, Manish is a good, responsible young adult but his parents worry because they don’t seem to have any control over Manish’s online life. They find it difficult to understand the digital realms that he seamlessly integrates into his life.

As young people across the country are creating these new hybrid physical-digital spaces of work, leisure and lifestyle, the “analogue generations” remain outside, concerned about how they can ensure that their children are safe online, and not abusing the power of this largely unregulated space.

Their paranoia is amplified by the stories of uncontrolled access to pornography, of children falling prey to sexual predators, fears of intellectual property theft, and subversive and violent mobilisations that the young orchestrate through these online networks. The need to regulate, control and design this digital environment that so many of these young people inhabit is countered by their own ignorance and lack of control over these spaces. Technological solutions, like cyber-nannies and filtering software that prevent access to websites that can have questionable content, have eventually proven to be futile preventatives.

Attempts at technology-based censorship are useless because these young people, digital natives, find ways to circumvent the attempts at controlling their access. It is clear that the solutions are outside of technology, and not very different from ways in which parents have always dealt with these questions.

Here are the top five ways to do so, which do not require a parent to become a netizen overnight, but can get them involved and make sure young users of technology remain responsible, safe and canny in their interactions online.

Monitored access: Instead of figuring out censorship software, parents need to learn that as with the TV, monitored access for younger users of the Internet is completely valid. Web 2.0 rhetoric promotes a strong sense of individualism and privacy and parents often feel like they are intruding on a child’s “private” time online. However, it is completely valid for parents to be in the same room and keeping an eye on what their child is up to while surfing.

Limited time: Instead of trying to control the content, try and help the young person to efficiently manage time and digital resources. We live in a world where the impulse to stay constantly connected is very strong. However, there is no reason why the young user has to be online in all their free time. If they are given a specified number of hours a week to spend online, they learn to use their time more efficiently. Password-protect the computers, take limited expenditure accounts for their mobile phones and have strict rules (which everybody in the family has to follow) about interface access during family time.

Shared computers: As computing becomes more personal, young users access the Internet from many computing devices like cellphones, personal laptops, etc. Studies have shown that young users who use shared machines kept in common areas of the house are less prone to accessing undesirable material online. Do not keep the computing devices in bedrooms. Use shared studies or quiet corners of the living room.

Get digital and involved: One of the reasons why young people often do not communicate with parents about their technological forays is because the older generation professes a digital disconnect. Take this opportunity to initiate a two-way learning. Get your children to teach you on how to use certain platforms and websites, and in conversations, you might be able to educate them about responsible behaviour online. This peer-to-peer connection helps establish trust and a safe space to discuss problematic areas. Parents of teenagers who join social networks like Facebook and Tumblr, and get to be a part of the child’s life, often find new channels of communication opening up for them.

Storytelling: Digital storytelling has huge potential for voicing concerns and problems. For these young people, the spaces provided online are safe spaces. They write freely, tell stories, create digital content, providing a gateway into what is happening in their lives. Recognise the creative potential of young users, appreciate their ability to tell these stories — through blogs, micro-blogs, audio and video podcasts, commentary on other content, etc. Getting them to tell stories and sharing your own with them makes for greater insight. Many cross-generational storytelling projects, where younger children tell the stories of the older people in the house, or write a combined blog have proven to be quite successful online.

At the end of the day, it is good to remember that the problems that new technologies throw up are not necessarily new. The solutions need to be found in our everyday interactions and practices, and dependence on technological application is often counter-productive. Technology can only be a way by which solutions are implemented.

The article by Nishant Shah was published in the Indian Express on March 11, 2011. The original can be read here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/suspended-in-web

A Talk by Charlotte Lapsansky

praskrishna — 2011-04-22T07:41:20Z

Charlotte Lapsansky will give a lecture on the "Mobile Voices project" at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore on Thursday, 16 September 2010.

Mobile Voices is an academic-community partnership to research and design a platform for low-wage immigrants in LA to publish stories about their lives and their communities directly from their mobile phones. This low-cost, open source, customizable, and easy to deploy multimedia mobile storytelling platform will be designed in collaboration with its users, and will help recent immigrants who lack computer access gain greater participation in the digital public sphere.

In this talk, Charlotte will describe the Mobile Voices project and discuss key themes that have arisen for the Mobile Voices project team, including participatory technology design, community digital storytelling, and digital inclusion through mobile-phone based platforms. She will then describe the key technological and social issues that have arisen in the process of adapting Mobile Voices for India and the opportunities and challenges this presents.

About Charlotte Lapsansky

Charlotte Lapsansky is a PhD Candidate and American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. Charlotte has a background in development communication and mass media campaigns addressing gender and health in India. At Annenberg, her research interests include communication for social change, participatory development communications, community mobilization and strategic campaign planning. For the past two years, she has been a team member for Mobile Voices, a participatory project which has created a Drupal-based digital storytelling platform for first-generation, low-wage migrant workers in Los Angeles, allowing them to create and publish stories about their communities directly from their mobile phones. Currently, Charlotte is collaborating with organizations in India to customize and adapt the mobile voices platform social endeavours in India.

VIDEOS

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/events/charlotte-lapsansky-talk