The Centre for Internet and Society
http://editors.cis-india.org
These are the search results for the query, showing results 131 to 145.
Re:Wiring Bodies
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/rewiring-bodies.pdf
<b>Asha’s monograph is a historical research inquiry to understand the ways in which gendered bodies are shaped by the Internet imaginaries in contemporary India. </b>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/rewiring-bodies.pdf'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/rewiring-bodies.pdf</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaResearch2011-09-27T06:46:00ZFileBetween the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/between-the-stirrup-and-the-ground-relocating-digital-activism
<b>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.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span"><em>Cross-posted from <a class="external-link" href="http://www.democracyandsociety.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/CDACS-DS-15-v3-fnl.pdf">Democracy and Society</a></em>.</span></p>
<hr />
<h2>Introduction</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>Context</h2>
<p>It is appropriate, perhaps, to begin a paper on digital activism, with a discussion of analogue activism[<a href="#1">1</a>] (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,[<a href="#2">2</a>] as well as how the realm of political action now needs to accommodate these developments.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>Snapshots</h2>
<p>We draw from our observations in the “Digital Natives with a Cause?”[<a href="#3">3</a>] 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.</p>
<p>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.[<a href="#4">4</a>] 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.</p>
<p>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."</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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."</p>
<h2>Propositions</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>About the Authors</h3>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span">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.</span></p>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span">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 </span><span class="Apple-style-span">interest are the role of digital technologies in social change processes.</span></p>
<h2><span class="Apple-style-span">References</span></h2>
<p>Domscheit-Berg, Daniel. 2011. <em>Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website</em>. New York: Crown Publishers.</p>
<p>Drummond, David. 2010. “A New Approach to China.” Available at: http:// googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html.</p>
<p>Godana, Nonkululeko. 2011. “Change is Yelling: Are you Listening?” <em>Digital Natives Position Papers</em>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. <em>The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom</em>. New York: Public Affairs.</p>
<p>Shirky, Clay. 2011. “The Political power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change.” <em>Foreign Affairs</em> 90, (1); p. 28-41.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Tsou, YiPing. 2010. “(Re)formatting Social Transformation in the Age of Digital Representation: On the Relationship of Technologies and Social Transformation”, <em>Digital Natives Position Papers</em>. 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.</p>
<p>West, Harry and Parvathi Raman. 2009. <em>Enduring Socialism: Exploration of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation</em>. London: Berghahn Books.</p>
<h2><span class="Apple-style-span">End Notes</span></h2>
<p class="discreet"><a name="1">[1]</a> 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.</p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="1"> </a></p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="2">[2]</a> 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: <a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/01/29/2110227/China-Blocks-Egypt-On-Twitter-Like-Site">http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/01/29/2110227/China-Blocks-Egypt-On-Twitter-Like-Site</a>.</p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="3">[3]</a> More information about the programme can be found <a href="http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause">here</a>.</p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="4">[4]</a> 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.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/between-the-stirrup-and-the-ground-relocating-digital-activism'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/between-the-stirrup-and-the-ground-relocating-digital-activism</a>
</p>
No publishernishantDigital ActivismDigital NativesResearchNet CulturesPublicationsResearchers at Work2015-10-25T05:58:59ZBlog EntryWe, the Cyborgs: Challenges for the Future of being Human
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs
<b>The Cyborg - a cybernetique organism which is a combination of the biological and the technological – has been at the centre of discourse around digital technologies. Especially with wearable computing and ubiquitous access to the digital world, there has been an increased concern that very ways in which we understand questions of life, human body and the presence and role of technologies in our worlds, are changing. In just the last few years, we have seen extraordinary measures – the successful production of synthetic bacteria, artificial intelligence that can be programmed to simulate human conditions like empathy and temperament, and massive mobilisation of people around the world, to fight against the injustices and inequities of their immediate environments. </b>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs</a>
</p>
No publisherkaeruResearch2012-12-14T12:15:23ZFolderWe, the Cyborgs: Challenges for the Future of being Human
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/the-cyborgs
<b>The Cyborg - a cybernetique organism which is a combination of the biological and the technological – has been at the centre of discourse around digital technologies. Especially with wearable computing and ubiquitous access to the digital world, there has been an increased concern that very ways in which we understand questions of life, human body and the presence and role of technologies in our worlds, are changing. In just the last few years, we have seen extraordinary measures – the successful production of synthetic bacteria, artificial intelligence that can be programmed to simulate human conditions like empathy and temperament, and massive mobilisation of people around the world, to fight against the injustices and inequities of their immediate environments. </b>
<p><strong>Rationale</strong></p>
<p>All of these, in some way or the other, hint at new models of
cyborgification which we need to unpack in order to understand a few
questions which have been at the helm of all philosophical inquiry and
practical design around Internet and Society:</p>
<ul><li>How do we understand ourselves as human? What are the technologies that define being human?</li><li>How
do conceptualise the technological beyond prosthetic imaginations? How
do we understand technology (especially the digital) as a condition?</li><li>What are the new challenges we shall face in law, ethics, life and social sciences as we increasingly live in Cyborg societies?<br /></li></ul>
<em>We , the Cyborgs</em>, is a first of its kind research inquiry that
locates these questions in a quickly digitising India to see the
challenges of being human in the time of technological futures. In her
seminal body of work on Cyborgs, Donna Haraway had posited the cyborg as
a creature of fiction and ironies; a monster, a trickster, a boundary
creature that is irreducible to the existing binaries of
human-technology, technology-nature, nature-regulation.
In imagining the cyborg as simultaneously fictitious and embodied in
practices of care and labour, Haraway was further hinting at a set of
questions that have never really entered discourse on cyborgs: Who are
we when we become cyborgs? What do we do with the cyborgs we have
produced? What are the other kinds of cyborgs? What are the new places
them? What are the other ways of understanding cyborgs? Asha Achuthan in
her monograph Re:Wiring Bodies, maps these questions along the axes of
Presence, Access, Inclusion and Resistance to understand ‘attitudes to
technology’.
Achuthan talks about a moment of elision where technology is separated
from the human body in the space of policy and critique. In those
moments of separation, there is the production of a cyborg body that is
suddenly vulnerable because it does not have the support of the
technological which was an essential part of its bodily experience. How
does this body get assimilated in our technology practices? What are the
axes of discrimination and inequity that are attributed to these bodies
in the process of cyborg making? Who are the actors that play a part in
designing these cyborg bodies and selves? In the Indian context, where
there has been a legacy of being technosocial subjects and cyborg
citizens in the nation’s own technoscience imagination of itself, we
need to locate the cyborg in new sites and contexts to see what the
regulation of technology and its integration in everyday life.
<strong><br /><br />Methodology</strong>
<p>Building upon her work, We, The Cyborgs, seeks to locate the cyborg
in India, on 3 interdisciplinary but connected sites to examine how
bodies, in their interaction with the design and practice of different
processes of regulation and control, are in the process of becoming
cyborgs. The inquiry locates the cyborg at intersections of Health Care,
Planning and Gender, to start unpacking the different futures of the
body-technology relationships that have been posited in terms like
post-human, techno-social, simulated bodies, bodies as traffic, etc. In
the process, it hopes to unravel the questions of methods, frameworks,
ethics and practices of bodies in conditions of technology.
<em>We, The Cyborgs</em>, aims to bring together a wide range of
researchers and practitioners from different disciplinary locations
including but not limited to – Art, Anthropology, Law, Planning,
Architecture and Design, Gender and Sexuality studies, Cultural Studies,
Life Sciences, Medicine, New Media Studies, etc. – to start a debate
around some of the key issues around cyborgs and cyborg-making in their
fields.</p>
<p><br /><strong></strong></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/the-cyborgs'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/the-cyborgs</a>
</p>
No publisherAsha AchuthanResearch2012-03-22T04:11:42ZCollection (Old)Porn: Law, Video & Technology
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/law-video-and-technology-old
<b>Namita Malhotra’s monograph on Pornography and Pleasure is possibly the first Indian reflection and review of its kind. It draws aside the purdah that pornography has become – the forbidden object as well as the thing that prevents you from looking at it – and fingers its constituent threads and textures. This monograph is not so much about a cultural product called porn as it is a meditation on visuality and seeing, the construction and experience of gazing, technology and bodies in the law, modern myths, the interactions between human and filmic bodies. And technology not necessarily as objects and devices that make pornography possible (but that too), but as history and evolution, process and method, and what this brings to understanding what pornography is.</b>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span"> </span></p>
<div><b><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/pornography-and-law" class="internal-link"><span class="internal-link">Click here</span></a> to read the full introduction.<br /></b><b><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/porn-law-video" class="internal-link" title="Porn: Law, Video, Technology">Click here</a> to download the Monograph.</b></div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/law-video-and-technology-old'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/law-video-and-technology-old</a>
</p>
No publisherNamita A MalhotraResearch2011-11-10T09:39:24ZCollection (Old)CEPT to Set up Centre to Research Role of Internet in Social Development
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/cept-centre-for-role-of-internet
<b>Nishant Shah, Director (Research) at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in Bangalore who will assist the centre, said: "No one predicted the outcome of the Arab Spring, because everyone was looking at the way Internet was being used globally, not at the local level. We had the pink chaddi campaign, the anti-corruption calls of the Hazare camp, and those against sexual violence in New Delhi, but they were largely ad-hoc and temporary, and disappeared." </b>
<div>
<p>Cross-posted from the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/cept-to-set-up-centre-to-research-role-of-internet-in-social-development/805448/1">Indian Express</a></p>
<p>Pratyush Shankar, an associate professor of architecture at CEPT University in Ahmedabad had begun teaching a new course, “Cyber Culture” at the institute when news of the Jasmine Revolution began to filter out from Tunisia. </p>
<p>By the time the 35-day course was over, a new government was in place in Tunis and Sharkar is now thrilled that a full-fledged centre to research the role of Internet in social and academic developments will be established at CEPT this session. </p>
<p>"I thought to myself, 'This is going to be big! Just watch how the internet is going to make this different! and I was right," said Shankar. </p>
<p>The establishment of the "Centre for Internet and Digital Technologies" will be supplemented by a weeklong workshop in August - "Locating Internets: Histories of the Internets in India" for academics from various disciplines, an effort the organisers hope will propel thinking on how Internet is now part and parcel of academia. </p>
<p>"When we give students assignments, the first thing they do is go to Google-uncle," said Shankar, pointing out the Internet’s "knowledge-producing" role, a phenomenon academia is not entirely willing to accept as a formal part of the teaching process although teachers use it extensively as a tool. </p>
<p>Shankar calls himself a 'non-techie', though he uses Internet as part of his work profile: his students post their assignments on a server called "Sa-nity", where he also uploads and archives work from previous batches. The latest plan is to form a blog where students will comment on the classroom teaching or discuss topics - 'an after-class space'. </p>
<p>Nishant Shah, Director (Research) at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in Bangalore who will assist the centre, said: "No one predicted the outcome of the Arab Spring, because everyone was looking at the way Internet was being used globally, not at the local level. We had the pink chaddi campaign, the anti-corruption calls of the Hazare camp, and those against sexual violence in New Delhi, but they were largely ad-hoc and temporary, and disappeared." </p>
<p>Shah said the reasons could be factors like caste, religion, language and region. </p>
<p>He added: "During the Independence movement, two things were going on at the same time; there were mass movements where foreign clothes were burnt, khadi promoted and the like, which was buoyed by a very active print media that spread the information and ideas." </p>
<p>Internet technology now is equivalent to the print technology of that time, he added. </p>
<p><em>This news was published in the Indian Express on June 18, 2011</em>.</p>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/cept-centre-for-role-of-internet'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/cept-centre-for-role-of-internet</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaResearch2011-08-02T06:06:55ZBlog EntryLocating Internets: Histories of the Internet(s) in India — Research Training and Curriculum Workshop: Call for Participation
http://editors.cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/workshop
<b>Deadline for submission: 26th July 2011-06-08;
When: 19th - 22nd August, 2011;
Where: Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT) University, Ahmedabad;
Organised by: Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore and CEPT University, Ahmedabad.
Please Note: Travel support is only available for domestic travel within India.</b>
<p>LOCATING INTERNETS is an innovative, multi-disciplinary, workshop that engages with some of the most crucial debates around Internet and Society within academic scholarship, discourse and practice in India. It explores Where, When, How and What has changed with the emergence of Internet and Digital Technologies in the country. The Internet is not a singular monolithic entity but is articulated in various forms – sometimes materially, through accessing the web; at others, through our experiences; and yet others through imaginations of policy and law. Internets have become a part of our everyday practice, from museums and archives, to school and university programmes, living rooms and public spaces, relationships and our bodily lived realities. It becomes necessary to reconfigure our existing concepts, frameworks and ideas to make sense of the rapidly digitising world around us. The Internet is no longer contained in niche disciplines or specialised everyday practices. LOCATING INTERNETS invites scholars, teachers, researchers, advanced research students and educationalists from any discipline to learn and discuss how to ask new questions and design innovative curricula in their discipline by introducing concepts and ideas from path-breaking research in India.</p>
<p>Comprised of training, public lectures, open discussion spaces, and hands-on curriculum building exercises, this workshop will introduce the participants to contemporary debates, help them articulate concerns and problems from their own research and practice, and build knowledge clusters to develop innovative and open curricula which can be implemented in interdisciplinary undergraduate spaces in the country. It showcases the research outputs produced by the Centre for Internet and Society’s Researchers @ Work Programme, and brings together nine researchers to talk about alternative histories, processes, and bodies of the Internets, and how they can be integrated into mainstream pedagogic practices and teaching environments.</p>
<h3>Knowledge Clusters for the Workshop</h3>
<p>LOCATING INTERNETS is designed innovatively to accommodate for various intellectual and practice based needs of the participants. While the aim is to introduce the participants to a wide interdisciplinary range of scholarship, we also hope to address particular disciplinary and scholarly concerns of the participants. The workshop is further divided into three knowledge clusters which help the participants to focus their energies and ideas in the course of the four days.</p>
<ul><li><strong>Bridging the Gap</strong>: This workshop seeks to break away from the utopian public discourse of the Internets as a-historical and completely dis-attached from existing technology ecologies in the country. This knowledge cluster intends to produce frameworks that help us contextualize the contemporary internet policy, discourse and practice within larger geo-political and socio-historical flows and continuities in Modern India. The first cluster chartsdifferent pre-histories of the Internets, mapping the continuities and ruptures through philosophy of techno-science, archiving practices, and electronifcation of governments,to develop new technology-society perspectives.</li><li><strong>Paradigms of Practice</strong>:One of the biggest concerns about Internet studies in India and other similar developed contexts is the object oriented approach that looks largely at specific usages, access, infrastructure, etc. However, it is necessary to understand that the Internet is not merely a tool or a gadget. The growth of Internets produces systemic changes at the level of process and thought. The technologies often get appropriated for governance both by the state and the civil society, producing new processes and dissonances which need to be charted. The second cluster looks at certain contemporary processes that the digital and Internet technologies change drastically in order to recalibrate the relationship between the state, the market and the citizen.</li><li><strong>Feet on the Ground</strong>: The third cluster looks at contemporary practices of the Internet to understand the recent histories of movements, activism and cultural practices online. It offers an innovative way of understanding the physical objects and bodies that undergo dramatic transitions as digital technologies become pervasive, persuasive and ubiquitous. It draws upon historical discourse, everyday practices and cultural performances to form new ways of formulating and articulating the shapes and forms of social and cultural structures.</li></ul>
<h3>Workshop Outcomes</h3>
<p>The participants are expected to engage with issue of Internet and it various systemic processes through their own disciplinary interests. Apart from lectures and orientation sessions, the participants will actively work on their own project ideas during the period in groups and will be guided by experts. The final outcome of the workshops would be curriculum for undergraduate and graduate teaching space of various disciplines in the country.</p>
<h3>Participation Guidelines</h3>
<p>LOCATING INTERNETS is now accepting submissions from interested participants in the following format:</p>
<ol><li>Name:</li><li>Institutional affiliation and title:</li><li>Address:</li><li>Email address:</li><li>Phone number:</li><li>A brief resume of work experience (max. 350 words)</li><li>Statement of interest (max. 350 words)</li><li>Key concerns you want to address in the Internet and Society field (max. 350 words)</li><li>Identification with one Knowledge-cluster of the workshop and a proposal for integrating it in your research/teaching practice (max. 500 words)</li><li>Current interface with technologies in your pedagogic practices (max. 350 words)</li><li>Additional information or relevant hyperlinks you might want to add (Max. 10 lines)<br /></li></ol>
<pre>Notes:</pre>
<ul><li>Submissions will be accepted only from participants in India, as attachments in .doc, .docx or .odt formats at <a class="external-link" href="mailto:locatinginternets@cis-india.org">locatingInternets@cis-india.org</a></li><li>Submissions made beyond 26th July 2011 may not be considered for participation. <br /></li><li>Submissions will be scrutinized by the organisers and selected participants will be informed by the 30th July 2011, about their participation.</li><li>Selected participants will be required to make their own travel arrangements to the workshop. A 2nd A.C. train return fare will be reimbursed to the participants. Shared accommodation and selected meals will be provided at the workshop.</li><li>A limited number of air-fare reimbursements will be available to participants in extraordinary circumstances. All travel support is only available for domestic travel in the country.<br /></li></ul>
<p><strong>Chairs</strong>: Nishant Shah, Director-Research, Centre for Internet and Society Bangalore;</p>
<p>Pratyush Shankar, Associate Professor & Head of Undergraduate Program, Faculty of Architecture, CEPT University</p>
<p><strong>Supported by</strong>: Kusuma Foundation, Hyderabad</p>
<p><strong>Experts</strong>:Anja Kovacs, Arun Menon, Asha Achuthan, Ashish Rajadhykasha, Aparna Balachandran, Namita Malhotra, Nithin Manayath, Nithya Vasudevan, Pratyush Shankar, Rochelle Pinto and Zainab Bawa</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/workshop'>http://editors.cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/workshop</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaDevelopmentGamingDigital ActivismDigital GovernanceResearchCISRAWFeaturedCyberculturesarchivesNew PedagogiesWorkshopIT Cities2011-07-21T06:00:39ZBlog EntryApril 2011 Bulletin
http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/april-2011-bulletin
<b>Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! In this issue we are pleased to present you the latest updates about our research, upcoming events, and news and media coverage:</b>
<h2><b>Researchers@Work</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">RAW is a multidisciplinary research initiative. CIS believes that in order to understand the contemporary concerns in the field of Internet and society, it is necessary to produce local and contextual accounts of the interaction between the Internet and socio-cultural and geo-political structures. To build original research knowledge base, the RAW programme has been collaborating with different organisations and individuals to focus on its three year thematic of Histories of the Internets in India.</p>
<h3>Workshops organised in Bangalore</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=334&qid=39041" target="_blank">Shadow Search Project (SSP)</a> [CIS, April 18, 2011]</li>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=335&qid=39041" target="_blank">Facebook Resistance</a></span> [CIS, April 2, 2011]</li>
</ul>
<h2><b>Digital Natives with a Cause?</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Digital Natives with a Cause? is a knowledge programme initiated by CIS and Hivos, Netherlands. It is a research inquiry that seeks to look at the changing landscape of social change and political participation and the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who want to critically engage with the dominant discourse on youth, technology and social change, in order to look at the alternative practices and ideas in the Global South. It also aims at building new ecologies that amplify and augment the interventions and actions of the digitally young as they shape our futures.</p>
<h3>Columns on Digital Natives</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A fortnightly column on ‘Digital Natives’ authored by Nishant Shah is featured in the Sunday Eye, the national edition of Indian Express, Delhi, from 19 September 2010 onwards. The following were published in the month of April:</p>
<ul>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=336&qid=39041" target="_blank">Who the Hack?</a></span> [Indian Express, April 24, 2011]</li>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=337&qid=39041" target="_blank">One for the avatar</a></span> [Indian Express, April 3, 2011]</li>
</ul>
<h3>Digital Natives Newsletter</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Links in the Chain is a bi-monthly publication which highlights the projects, ideas and news of the Digital Natives with a Cause? The first issue of volume IV is here:</p>
<ul>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=338&qid=39041" target="_blank">links in the chain volume 4 Best Practices</a></span></li>
</ul>
<h3>New Blog Entry by Samuel Tettner</h3>
<p>Samuel Tettner is a Digital Natives Coordinator in CIS. He has written the following blog entry:</p>
<ul>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=339&qid=39041" target="_blank">Cyber Fears: What scares Digital Natives and those around them</a></span></li>
</ul>
<h2><b>Accessibility</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Estimates of the percentage of the world's population that is disabled vary considerably. But what is certain is that if we count functional disability, then a large proportion of the world's population is disabled in one way or another. At CIS we work to ensure that the digital technologies, which empower disabled people and provide them with independence, are allowed to do so in practice and by the law. To this end, we support web accessibility guidelines, and change in copyright laws that currently disempower the persons with disabilities.</p>
<h3>Workshop organised in Hyderabad</h3>
<ul>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=340&qid=39041" target="_blank">Web Sites Accessibility Evaluation Methodologies: Conference Report</a></span></li>
</ul>
<h2><b>Openness</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS believes that innovation and creativity should be fostered through openness and collaboration and is committed towards promotion of open standards, open access, and free/libre/open source software. Its latest endeavour has resulted into these:</p>
<h3>Submission</h3>
<ul>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=341&qid=39041" target="_blank">Comments on Draft National Policy on ICT in School Education</a></span></li>
</ul>
<h3>New Blog Entry</h3>
<ul>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=342&qid=39041" target="_blank">Towards Open and Equitable Access to Research and Knowledge for Development</a></span> [PLoS, March 29, 2011]</li>
</ul>
<h2><b>Internet Governance</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Although there may not be one centralized authority that rules the Internet, the Internet does not just run by its own volition: for it to operate in a stable and reliable manner, there needs to be in place infrastructure, a functional domain name system, ways to curtail cyber crime across borders, etc. The Tunis Agenda of the second World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), paragraph 34 defined Internet governance as “the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet.” Its latest endeavour has resulted into these:</p>
<h3>Featured</h3>
<ul>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=343&qid=39041" target="_blank">DIT's Response to RTI on Website Blocking</a></span></li>
</ul>
<h3>New Blog Entries</h3>
<ul>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=344&qid=39041" target="_blank">What are the legal provisions for blocking websites in India?</a></span></li>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=345&qid=39041" target="_blank">We are anonymous, we are legion</a></span> [published in the Hindu, April 18, 2011]</li>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=346&qid=39041" target="_blank">You Have the Right to Remain Silent</a></span> [published in the Sunday Guardian, April 17, 2011]</li>
</ul>
<h3>Study Tour</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=347&qid=39041" target="_blank">Iraq Delegation to Visit India for Study of E-Governance in Indian Cities ― Meetings in Bangalore and Delhi</a></li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS is doing a project, ‘Privacy in Asia’. <i>It is funded by Privacy International (PI), UK and the International Development Research Centre, Canada and is being administered in collaboration with the Society and Action Group, Gurgaon</i>. The two-year project commenced on 24 March 2010 and will be completed as agreed to by the stakeholders. It was set up with the objective of raising awareness, sparking civil action and promoting democratic dialogue around challenges and violations of privacy in India. In furtherance of these goals it aims to draft and promote over-arching privacy legislation in India by drawing upon legal and academic resources and consultations with the public.</p>
<h3>Featured Research</h3>
<ul>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=348&qid=39041" target="_blank">The DNA Profiling Bill 2007 and Privacy</a></span></li>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=349&qid=39041" target="_blank">Privacy and the Information Technology Act — Do we have the Safeguards for Electronic Privacy?</a></span></li>
</ul>
<h3>Interview</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=350&qid=39041" target="_blank">An Interview with Activist Shubha Chacko: Privacy and Sex workers</a></li>
</ul>
<h3>Workshops organized in Ahmedabad and Bangalore</h3>
<ul>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=351&qid=39041" target="_blank">'Privacy Matters', Ahmedabad: Conference Report</a></span> [Ahmedabad Management Association, Ahmedabad, March 26, 2011]</li>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=352&qid=39041" target="_blank">Privacy, By Design</a></span> [CIS, April 16, 2011]</li>
</ul>
<h3>New Blog Entries</h3>
<ul>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=353&qid=39041" target="_blank">Is Data Protection Enough?</a></span></li>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=354&qid=39041" target="_blank">Surveillance Technologies</a></span></li>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=355&qid=39041" target="_blank">Encryption Standards and Practices</a></span></li>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=356&qid=39041" target="_blank">News Broadcasting Standards Authority censures TV9 over privacy violations!</a></span></li>
</ul>
<h2><b>Telecom</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The growth in telecommunications in India has been impressive. While the potential for growth and returns exist, a range of issues need to be addressed for this potential to be realized. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the second aspect is a countrywide access to broadband which is low at about eight million subscriptions. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum. It is imperative to resolve these issues in the common interest of users and service providers. CIS campaigns to facilitate this:</p>
<h3>Column</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Shyam Ponappa is a Distinguished Fellow at CIS. He writes regularly on Telecom issues in the Business Standard and these articles are mirrored on the CIS website as well.</p>
<ul>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=357&qid=39041" target="_blank">Learning from Fukushima</a></span> [published in the Business Standard on April 7, 2011]</li>
</ul>
<h2><b>News & Media Coverage</b></h2>
<ul>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=358&qid=39041" target="_blank">The Gary Chapman International School on Digital Transformation</a></span>[International School on Digital Transformation, July 17-22, 2011]</li>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=359&qid=39041" target="_blank">Iraqi delegation in Bangalore to study e-governance projects</a></span> [Economic Times, April 20, 2011]</li>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=360&qid=39041" target="_blank">Dark waders</a></span> [Time Out Bengaluru, Vol. 3, Issue 20, April 15 - 28, 2011]</li>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=361&qid=39041" target="_blank">Beyond Clicktivism</a></span> [Outlook, April 18, 2011]</li>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=362&qid=39041" target="_blank">Gone in a flash</a></span> [Times of India, April 16, 2011]</li>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=363&qid=39041" target="_blank">How Web 2.0 responded to Hazare</a></span> [Hindu, April 11, 2011]</li>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=364&qid=39041" target="_blank">EU Commissioner Hedegaard to deliver keynote address at consumer world congress</a></span></li>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=365&qid=39041" target="_blank">Net cracker</a></span> [Time Out Bengaluru Vol. 3 Issue 19, April 1 - 14, 2011]</li>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=366&qid=39041" target="_blank">On the Path to Global Open Access: A Few More Miles to Go</a></span> [PLoS, March 2011, Volume 8, Issue 3]</li>
</ul>
<h2>Follow us elsewhere</h2>
<ul>
<li>Get short, timely messages from us on <a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=367&qid=39041" target="_blank">Twitter</a></li>
<li>Follow CIS on <a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=368&qid=39041" target="_blank">identi.ca</a></li>
<li>Join the CIS group on <a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=369&qid=39041" target="_blank">Facebook</a></li>
<li>Visit us at <a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=370&qid=39041" target="_blank">www.cis-india.org</a></li>
</ul>
<p><i>CIS is grateful to Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.</i></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/april-2011-bulletin'>http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/april-2011-bulletin</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaAccess to KnowledgeTelecomAccessibilityInternet GovernanceResearchOpenness2012-07-30T10:45:01ZPageThe Task of the Translator after Google
http://editors.cis-india.org/events/lecture-by-hans
<b>Hans Verghese Mathews, a distinguished fellow with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) will give a public lecture on April 30, 2011.</b>
<p>The talk will consider again ― proceeding upon the increasing 'searchability' of literary corpora that the Web will presumably allow ― the special task assigned the translator by Walter Benjamin: which was the 'restitution' of 'originals' through the 'afterlives' given them by their 'traducings' into other languages. A reformulation of that task will be attempted: but the exercise will be conducted in an illustrative way, in the course of examining the approved translation into English of <em>El Aleph</em>, one of the more famous among the early <em>ficciones</em> of Borges.</p>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span">
</span></p>
<h3>Hans Varghese Mathews</h3>
<p> </p>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/hans.jpg/image_preview" alt="Hans Verghese Mathews" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Hans Verghese Mathews" /></p>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span">Hans Varghese Mathews read philosophy as an undergraduate, at the University of Southern California, studying logic and aesthetics; and went on to obtain a doctorate in mathematics, from the University of Wisconsin, studying algebraic topology primarily, with mathematical logic and philosophy as subsidiary subjects. He has been a research associate with the Indian Statistical Institute, and has written extensively on visual art for Frontline; he currently directs mathematical modelling for an analytics firm, and is a contributing editor to the online journal Phalanx. He has an abiding interest in the formal understanding of painting and poetry; and a more recent and dominating interest in the mathematisation of the social sciences.</span></p>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span"><strong>VIDEO</strong><br /></span></p>
<iframe src="http://blip.tv/play/AYLWw04A.html" frameborder="0" height="250" width="250"></iframe><embed style="display:none" src="http://a.blip.tv/api.swf#AYLWw04A" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/events/lecture-by-hans'>http://editors.cis-india.org/events/lecture-by-hans</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaLectureResearch2011-10-07T05:36:43ZEventNo access to pornography in cyber cafes, declare new rules
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/no-pornography-in-cyber-cafes
<b>Fresh guidelines, which are part of Information Technology (guidelines for cyber cafe) Rules 2011, will require cyber cafe owners to "tell users" not to surf websites that contain "pornographic or obscene material". Experts termed the rule arbitrary, saying that watching pornography is not an offence in India. This article by Javed Anwer was published in the Times of India on April 26, 2011.</b>
<p>According to the rules notified on April 11, all cyber cafes in the country will have to register with an "agency as notified" by the government. While some of the guidelines deal with the security threat posed by "anonymous internet users", most aim to make sure that people don't use cyber cafes to access pornographic material.</p>
<p>Pawan Duggal, a lawyer who specializes in IT laws, said the new guidelines were arbitrary. "Watching pornography is not illegal in India," he said. "It's absurd to ask cyber cafe owners to tell their customers not to access pornographic material even as law allows individuals to access adult websites unless it's not child pornography. The new rules require a second look."</p>
<p>The new rules suggest cafe owners install filtering software and keep a log of all websites accessed by customers for at least one year. Cafe owners have also been asked not to build a cabin/cubicle with a height of more than four and half feet. In a cyber cafe where there are no cubicles, "owners will have to place computers with the screens facing outward" or towards open space. The move is aimed at reducing privacy a cyber cafe user can get.</p>
<p>Duggal said if implemented earnestly, the new rules will put most of cyber cafe owners out of business.</p>
<blockquote class="webkit-indent-blockquote">
<p>Internet activists termed the guidelines "unconstitutional". Pranesh Prakash, a programme manager with Centre of Internet and Society, said the rules will violate privacy and will hamper internet users' ability to freely express themselves.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The new rules make it mandatory for user to carry an identity card. Cyber cafe owners have been asked to give user logs to the "registration agency" every month as well keep these records along with the log of websites accessed at the cyber cafe safe for a period of one year. A few cafe owners said that technically, it would be a daunting task to keep a record of every website accessed using their computers for a year.</p>
<blockquote class="webkit-indent-blockquote">
<p>While minors, if carrying identity cards have been permitted to use computers in a cyber cafe, they won't be allowed inside cubicles if not accompanied by guardians or parents. There is also provision of photographing cyber cafe users using a webcam or other device. The photographs will have to be authenticated by the user. Prakash said that photographing users raises serious privacy questions, especially in the case of children.</p>
</blockquote>
<span class="Apple-style-span"><em>Read the original article published by the Times of India</em> <a class="external-link" href="http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-04-26/internet/29474462_1_cyber-cafe-cafe-owners-cubicles">here</a></span>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/no-pornography-in-cyber-cafes'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/no-pornography-in-cyber-cafes</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaResearch2011-05-01T01:09:50ZNews ItemNet cracker
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/net-cracker
<b>Is Facebook taking over our lives? And if it is, so what? In email interviews with new media researcher and user control advocate Marc Stumpel who is conducting a Facebook Resistance workshop this fortnight, and artist and communication designer Tobias Leingruber, the originator of the FB Resistance idea, Akhila Seetharaman attempts to answer these questions. This article was published in Time Out Bengaluru Vol. 3 Issue 19, April 1 - 14, 2011.</b>
<h3>There’s a lot said about the role of social media in fuelling political revolutions. What do you make of the role of Facebook, for instance, in the recent uprisings in the Arab world?</h3>
<p><strong>Marc Stumpel </strong>Clearly, social media has been utilised as instruments by citizens in the Middle East to organise and coordinate democratic protests. They have also proven to be important sources for real-time reporting and documenting political events. The use of networked communication in political protests, however, is nothing new. In my view, it’s wrong to assume there is a causal relationship between social media and “political revolutions”. You need “the people” to instigate a revolution; they will unquestionably use any media at hand.</p>
<p>My interest lies more with researching and exposing the political dimension of social media, rather than questioning its relationship with the politics that we are used to talking and writing about. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are sites of governance themselves, as the user activities, conditions and data distribution are maintained by a particular set of rules and constraints, embedded in the software.</p>
<h3>How do social media sites control people, while at the same time giving them more outlets for self expression and communication?</h3>
<p><strong>MS</strong> Proprietary social networking software like Facebook have many constraints, which means that users have to abide by the laws and strict limits as defined by the software. Where is our ‘freedom’? For example, why not let the users change their background colour or ‘dislike’ something?</p>
<h3>There have been many changes to Facebook that have met with widespread opposition and outrage. How does one make sense of these instances?</h3>
<p><strong>MS</strong> Facebook’s PR communication regarding its immediate software changes has been very deceptive. They’ve repeatedly used a particular vocabulary to create images of Facebook ‘apologising’ for or ‘justifying’ rigid changes. They say, ‘Look! We ‘simplified’ privacy controls, because we care about your privacy,’ while making them more complex instead.</p>
<h3>Can you tell us a few things that Facebook users should know but don’t, about the way Facebook uses their stuff?</h3>
<p>Tobias Leingruber Realise the nature of the company. Google is not a search engine. Google is an advertising network. Facebook is not a social network – it’s an advertising network. We are the product, ‘the sheeple’. We get to be in a herd, but we pay with our most private data. They shave our wool.</p>
<p><strong>MS</strong> Facebook is not transparent about its Web user-tracking activities. Via cookies it saves every website you visit outside of Facebook that has any FB social plugin implemented. We don’t exactly know what FB does with this tracking data.</p>
<h3>What is the Facebook Resistance?</h3>
<p><strong>MS</strong> Our attempt is to resist from within the system by slowly undermining and questioning it. This means we’re not leaving it and building a new one. We’re accepting the fact that Facebook has already ‘won’ for now, and we’re trying to make the best out of it by bending its rules.</p>
<h3>Critical talk about social media landscape often borrows from the lexicon of war – with online suicide, tactical media, resistance, etc. How much of a warzone is it?</h3>
<p>TL Nice observation! Actually ‘cyberwar’ has become very real this year, as US and Israeli militants created a worm that successfully attacked and physically destroyed parts of the Iranian nuclear research programme.</p>
<p>But more specifically on social media I think those extreme terms are very helpful to get people’s attention. We’re overwhelmed by information, so getting people’s attention is an art form itself.</p>
<p><strong>MS</strong> We are not at ‘war’ with Facebook; we are at “softwar”, fighting for internet freedom and the adoption of open standards.</p>
<h3>What is the potential of resistance to Facebook? What can be achieved?</h3>
<p>TL In theory we could undermine and replace their entire system. For example, the chat – to get rid of the tracking and censorship, the system behind Facebook’s chat interface could be replaced with something else, such as the Jabber protocol through an independent server.</p>
<p><strong>MS</strong> Expanding your freedom on Facebook by learning how to impose new rules and features onto the system through internet browser processing (thus, not changing any code on Facebook’s server) and spreading awareness about this possibility.</p>
<p><em>Photography by Tobias Leingruber</em></p>
<p>Read the original article <a class="external-link" href="http://www.timeoutbangalore.com/aroundtown/aroundtown_preview_details.asp?code=73">here</a></p>
<p>Download the article <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/research/facebook-resistance" class="internal-link" title="Facebook Resistance Article">here</a> [pdf 3.7 mb]</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/net-cracker'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/net-cracker</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaResearch2011-04-02T17:11:03ZNews ItemMarch 2011 Bulletin
http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/march%20-2011-bulletin
<b>Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! In this issue we are pleased to present you the latest updates about our research, upcoming events, and news and media coverage.</b>
<h2><b>Researchers@Work</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">RAW is a multidisciplinary research initiative. CIS believes that in order to understand the contemporary concerns in the field of Internet and society, it is necessary to produce local and contextual accounts of the interaction between the Internet and socio-cultural and geo-political structures. To build original research knowledge base, the RAW programme has been collaborating with different organisations and individuals to focus on its three year thematic of Histories of the Internets in India. Monographs finalised from these projects are online for peer review.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">New Blog Entry by Zainab Bawa in Transparency and Politics</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/research/cis-raw/histories/transparency/transparency-politics-it-in-india" target="_blank">A History of Transparency, Politics and Information Technologies in India</a></li>
</ul>
<h2><b>Digital Natives with a Cause?</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Digital Natives with a Cause? is a knowledge programme initiated by CIS and Hivos, Netherlands. It is a research inquiry that seeks to look at the changing landscape of social change and political participation and the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who want to critically engage with the dominant discourse on youth, technology and social change, in order to look at the alternative practices and ideas in the Global South. It also aims at building new ecologies that amplify and augment the interventions and actions of the digitally young as they shape our futures.</p>
<h3>Column on Digital Natives</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A fortnightly column on ‘Digital Natives’ authored by Nishant Shah is featured in the Sunday Eye, the national edition of Indian Express, Delhi, from 19 September 2010 onwards. The following was published recently:</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/research/dn/watson-knows" target="_blank">Watson knows the Question</a> [Indian Express, March 6, 2011]</li>
</ul>
<h3>Blog Entries by Maesey Angelina</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Maesey Angelina works as a programme officer at Hivos, Jakarta on gender, women and development while exploring research initiatives on Digital Natives in Indonesia. She spent one month in CIS, working on her dissertation, exploring the Blank Noise project under the Digital Natives with a Cause framework. She writes a series of blog entries. The new ones are:</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/research/dn/reflecting-from-the-beyond" target="_blank">Reflecting from the Beyond</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/research/dn/activism-unraveling-the-term" target="_blank">Activism: Unraveling the Term</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/research/dn/the-many-faces-within" target="_blank">The Many Faces Within</a> </li>
</ul>
<h3>Blog Entries by Samuel Tettner</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Samuel Tettner is a Digital Natives Coordinator in CIS. He has written the following blog entries:</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/research/dn/i-believe-that-______-should-be-a-right-in-the-digital-age" target="_blank">I Believe that .......... should be a Right in the Digital Age</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/research/dn/science-technology-and-society-conference-in-indore-march-12-13" target="_blank">Science, Technology and Society International Conference – Some Afterthoughts</a></li>
</ul>
<h2><b>Accessibility</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Estimates of the percentage of the world's population that is disabled vary considerably. But what is certain is that if we count functional disability, then a large proportion of the world's population is disabled in one way or another. At CIS we work to ensure that the digital technologies, which empower disabled people and provide them with independence, are allowed to do so in practice and by the law. To this end, we support web accessibility guidelines, and change in copyright laws that currently disempower the persons with disabilities.</p>
<h3>Featured Research</h3>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/advocacy/accessibility/blog/accessible-mobile-handsets" target="_blank">Accessible Mobile Handsets in India: An Overview</a></li>
</ul>
<h3>Blog Entry</h3>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/advocacy/accessibility/blog/rights-of-persons-with-disabilities" target="_blank">Note on the Authorities under the Working Draft of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2011 (9th February 2011)</a> </li>
</ul>
<h2><b>Intellectual Property</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS believes that access to knowledge and culture is essential as it promotes creativity and innovation and bridges the gaps between the developed and developing world positively. Hence, the campaigns for an international treaty on copyright exceptions for print-impaired, advocating against PUPFIP Bill, calls for the WIPO Broadcast Treaty to be restricted to broadcast, questioning the demonization of 'pirates', and supporting endeavours that explore and question the current copyright regime. Its latest endeavour has resulted into these:</p>
<h3>Featured Research</h3>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/advocacy/ipr/blog/plagiarism-in-indian-academia" target="_blank">Pirates, Plagiarisers, Publishers</a> [ Written by Prashant Iyengar and originally published in the Economic & Political Weekly, February 26, 2011, Vol XLVI No 9]</li>
</ul>
<h3>Submission</h3>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/advocacy/ipr/blog/wipo-broadcast-treaty-comments-march-2011" target="_blank">Comments to the Ministry on WIPO Broadcast Treaty</a> (March 2011)</li>
</ul>
<h2><b>Openness</b></h2>
<h3>Workshops organised</h3>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/events/design-public" target="_blank">Design!publiC</a> [Taj Vivanta, New Delhi, March 18, 2011]</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/events/open-access" target="_blank">Open Access to Scientific Information Indian International Centre</a> [New Delhi, March 16, 2011]</li>
</ul>
<h2><b>Internet Governance</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Although there may not be one centralized authority that rules the Internet, the Internet does not just run by its own volition: for it to operate in a stable and reliable manner, there needs to be in place infrastructure, a functional domain name system, ways to curtail cyber crime across borders, etc. The Tunis Agenda of the second World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), paragraph 34 defined Internet governance as “the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet.” CIS involvement in the field of Internet governance has taken the following shape:</p>
<h3>Submissions</h3>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/advocacy/accessibility/blog/electronic-delivery-of-services-comments" target="_blank">The Draft Electronic Delivery of Services Bill, 2011 – Comments by CIS</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/advocacy/igov/blog/policy-for-governments-presence-in-social-media-recommendations" target="_blank">Policy for Government's Presence in Social Media - Recommendations</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/advocacy/igov/blog/rtis-on-website-blocking" target="_blank">RTI Applications on Blocking of Websites</a></li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS is doing a project, ‘Privacy in Asia’. <i>It is funded by Privacy International (PI), UK and the International Development Research Centre, Canada and is being administered in collaboration with the Society and Action Group, Gurgaon</i>. The two-year project commenced on 24 March 2010 and will be completed as agreed to by the stakeholders. It was set up with the objective of raising awareness, sparking civil action and promoting democratic dialogue around challenges and violations of privacy in India. In furtherance of these goals it aims to draft and promote over-arching privacy legislation in India by drawing upon legal and academic resources and consultations with the public.</p>
<h3>Submission</h3>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/advocacy/igov/privacy-india/privacy_govdatabase" target="_blank">Privacy and Governmental Database</a> </li>
</ul>
<p>Workshops organized</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/events/privacy-matters-ahmedabad" target="_blank">Privacy Matters - A Public Conference in Ahmedabad</a> [Ahmedabad, March 26, 2011]</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/events/ian" target="_blank">Public Talk by Dr. Ian Brown on Privacy, Trust and Biometrics</a> [Centre for Contemporary Studies, IISc, Bangalore, March 21, 2011]</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/events/electronication" target="_blank">Electronication: Ragas and the Future</a> [Jaaga, Bangalore, March 6, 2011]</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/events/fostering-freedom-of-expression" target="_blank">Role of the Internet in Fostering Freedom of Expression and Strengthening Activism in India - A Workshop in Delhi</a> [Constitution Club, New Delhi, March 4, 2011]</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/events/global-freedom-expression" target="_blank">Global Challenges to Freedom of Expression</a> [Constitution Club, New Delhi, March 4, 2011]</li>
</ul>
<h2><b>Telecom</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The growth in telecommunications in India has been impressive. While the potential for growth and returns exist, a range of issues need to be addressed for this potential to be realized. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the second aspect is a countrywide access to broadband which is low at about eight million subscriptions. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum. It is imperative to resolve these issues in the common interest of users and service providers. CIS campaigns to facilitate this:</p>
<h3>Featured Research</h3>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/advocacy/telecom/blog/untapped-potential" target="_blank">India's untapped potential: Are a billion people losing out because of spectrum?</a></li>
</ul>
<h3>Column</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Shyam Ponappa is a Distinguished Fellow at CIS. He writes regularly on Telecom issues in the Business Standard and these articles are mirrored on the CIS website as well.</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/advocacy/telecom/blog/big-bang-budgets" target="_blank">Big-Bang Budgets?</a> [published in the Business Standard on March 3, 2011]</li>
</ul>
<h3><b>Forthcoming Events</b></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS is organising some conferences/workshops in the month of March/April:</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/events/w3c-conference-hyderabad" target="_blank">Web Sites Accessibility Evaluation Methodologies: A New Imperative for State Parties to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities</a>[Hyderabad International Convention Centre, Hyderabad]</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/events/shadow-search-in-cis" target="_blank">Shadow Search Project (SSP) in CIS</a> [CIS, Bangalore]</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/events/facebook-resistance" target="_blank">Facebook Resistance Workshop</a> [CIS, Bangalore]</li>
</ul>
<h2><b>News & Media Coverage</b></h2>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/networking-better-governance" target="_blank">Networking its way to better governance</a> (Hindu, March 28, 2011]</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/failed-uk-nir-project" target="_blank">‘Learn from failed UK NIR project’</a> (Deccan Chronicle, March 22, 2011]</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/design-public-livemint-coverage" target="_blank">Design!publiC - News from Livemint</a> (Livemint, March 18, 2011)</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/muzzling-internet" target="_blank">Muzzling the Internet</a> (Outlook, March 17, 2011)</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/battle-internet" target="_blank">Battle for the Internet</a> (Down to Earth, Issue: March 15, 2011)</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/cause-and-effect" target="_blank">Cause and effect Facebook-style</a> (Hindustan Times, March 13, 2011)</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/catch-all" target="_blank">Catch-all approach to Net freedom draws activist ire</a> (Sunday Guardian, March 13, 2011)</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/suspended-in-web" target="_blank">Lives suspended in the Web</a> (Indian Express, March 11, 2011)</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/it-guidelines-gag-internet-freedom" target="_blank">Draft IT guidelines may gag internet freedom</a> (Times of India, March 11, 2011)</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/govt-proposal" target="_blank">Govt proposal to muzzle bloggers sparks outcry</a> (Times of India, March 10, 2011)</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/online-censorship" target="_blank">New Indian Rules May Make Online Censorship Easier</a> (Yahoo News, March 7, 2011)</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/anti-social-network" target="_blank">Anti-Social Network</a> (Mail Today, February 27, 2011)</li>
</ul>
<h2>Follow us elsewhere</h2>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Get short, timely messages from us on <a href="http://twitter.com/cis_india" target="_blank">Twitter</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Follow CIS on <a href="http://identi.ca/main/remote?nickname=cis" target="_blank">identi.ca</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Join the CIS group on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=28535315687" target="_blank">Facebook</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Visit us at <a href="http://www.cis-india.org/" target="_blank">www.cis-india.org</a></li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>CIS is grateful to Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.</i></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/march%20-2011-bulletin'>http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/march%20-2011-bulletin</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaAccess to KnowledgeDigital NativesTelecomAccessibilityInternet GovernanceResearchOpenness2012-07-30T10:59:46ZPageA History of Transparency, Politics and Information Technologies in India
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/transparency-politics-it-in-india
<b>In this blog post, Zainab Bawa reviews the different spectrums of information, transparency and politics.</b>
<p>Politics has always been fashioned by information, a friend<a href="#1">1</a> pointed out when I mentioned to her about this blog post I was writing to summarize my research on the CIS-RAW monograph about the history of Transparency, Politics and Information Technologies in India.</p>
<p>
The question that then arises is what kinds of information and subsequently, what kinds of politics (and vice-versa) are we referring to? I want to begin this blog post by reviewing the different spectrums of information and the contexts within which these different kinds of information become important/unimportant/valuable/invaluable for which groups in our polity? Consequently, how are our own notions of politics informed and how does politics, in terms of ideals such as democracy, equity, access, rights and justice, evolve/perpetuate in practice?</p>
<p>We, as individuals and as part of various groups in society, thrive on information for sustaining and enhancing different aspects of our lives, be they social, political, economic, cultural or historical. The criticality of information, especially information networks, has been revealed to us starkly in recent times by the 3G licensing scam where major corporations were vying for ‘insider’ information that would make it easier for them to obtain the requisite telecom licenses. Clearly, the 3G scam is not the first (and neither will it be the last) instance of the politics of lobbying, aligning with individuals and networks which provide ‘the’ ‘insider’ information and the capitalization of this information. We have known about the politics of ‘insider information’ in the context of stock markets and through Hamish McDonald’s explication of the way corporate giants such as Reliance and then Bombay Dyeing (aka the Wadia clan) have been ‘cultivating’ their ‘insider’ sources in the central government cabinets and ministries. The secrecy and more importantly the exclusiveness that underlies this kind of ‘insider’ information angers a certain strand of public and deepens the cynicism that pervades across a large section of the citizenry. The nature of this secrecy and exclusiveness gets compounded by the fact that there are phenomenally vast sums of money that are involved in this form of ‘insider’ information and the ensuing scams, thereby agitating different people because had there been ‘fair play’ and ‘true competition’, the monies could have benefitted the targeted beneficiaries in a ‘proper’ manner.</p>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span">There is another kind of ‘insider’ information which exists on this spectrum of ‘insider’ information in particular and information in general, which I want to bring to your attention here. In 2008, I was researching the practices and reach of microfinance in Mumbai <span class="Apple-style-span"><a href="#2">2</a>My research led me, for the first time, to the resettlement and rehabilitation (R&R) housing colonies of Mumbai. </span></span></p>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span">These R & R colonies had been built to rehabilitate slum dwellers and squatters (occupying lands owned by different government agencies and private individuals/parties) whose possessions (claims over land and built structures were coming in the way of widening roads and railway tracks and building flyovers and rail over bridges under two mega infrastructure projects in Mumbai city then. Policies were formulated to compensate and rehabilitate persons and households who would be affected by these mega projects (PAPs and PAHs). I interviewed some of the PAPs and PAHs in an effort to understand the R&R process and the impact that the process had had on their lives and their relationship with the city and its governance. </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></span></span>During many of these interviews, the issue of ‘insider information’ repeatedly came up. PAPs and PAHs explained to me that as part of the R&R policies, surveys had been conducted to identify persons and households who would be eligible for compensation and resettlement. During the surveys, surveyors tried to determine since when the individuals and households had been residing in their houses/on the land, whether they owned the lands/built structures, and whether the structure was to be enumerated as a single unit or more and accordingly what should be the corresponding compensation awarded to the affected person/household. One form of ‘insider information’ in this context pertained to the knowledge of when the surveys would be carried out in the different settlements/squatted spaces so that people would make arrangements accordingly to claim entitlements under the R&R policies. For instance, in many cases, more than one family resided in the same built structure and consequently, only one house would be allotted in lieu of that structure irrespective of the number of families residing in it. Prior knowledge of the surveys, which was usually just a day or two before, would enable these families/households to determine how they would articulate their claim for more than one housing unit, either through appeal to the surveyor’s moral rationalities, or through graft and subversive strategies such as putting up makeshift structures, etc. <br /> <br />A second aspect of ‘insider’ information pertained to the number of units that would be allotted to different households/individuals i.e., those groups, leaders, NGOs (non-government organizations), CBOs (community based organizations), individuals and actors who were directly responsible for the allotment of housing and shops units under the R&R policies allotted more than the ‘fair’ share of entitlements to their favoured constituencies/households. Such actors even traded i.e., sold, the housing unit allotments to persons who were eager to buy these ‘low-income’ units, thus, giving rise to a form of property market around R&R policies and this kind of state intervention. Also, those who had direct/indirect access to actors making such allotments used their influence to obtain at least the compensation that should have accrued to them or more and, as mentioned above, persons interested in purchasing housing units despite not being from the settlement or even the same economic and social milieu influenced the ‘decision-makers’ in this case. An interesting outcome of this kind of ‘insider information’ was that those who had struggled to receive their due R&R compensations perceived these ‘extra legal’ (in this context) allotments as kabza (capture) of the resources (and space which is a premium in Mumbai city) offered under government policies. This notion of ‘kabza’ has now become part of the vocabulary of parties aggrieved by the allotment process and is being mobilized for fulfilling certain kinds of claims advanced before planning agencies in Mumbai, municipalities and the Maharashtra state government.<br /> <br />A third highly interesting form of ‘insider information’ in this R&R process was the prior knowledge that R&R would take place in due course of time, surveys would be conducted and there would be compensations awarded in the form of housing units and commercial spaces. This prior knowledge fuelled an atmosphere of intense speculation in some settlements where many individuals and households began to sell their possessions, built structures, shop spaces, etc., to newcomers (who would then be entitled to compensation under R&R) and the sellers moved out of the settlement to other areas, probably those that would not be marked for R&R or to neighbouring areas. Property values rose in such cases because newcomers were eager to be enumerated for a ‘secure’ entitlement, in this case a house/shop. Apart from the speculation which ensued from this form of ‘insider information’, ambiguity was also created, mainly related to determining who were the ‘original’ inhabitants and who were the ‘fake/newcomers’. There were no easy answers to resolving this ambiguity and interestingly, this ambiguity now resides (and may be legitimated in due course of time) in the survey records of the NGOs which were responsible for conducting the surveys, in the government’s entitlements’ records and now, in the property registries of the planning department and municipality that are being created as part of legalization of ownership of the R&R housing and commercial units. <br /> <br />What I have tried to explain through the examples of the 3G scam and the R&R process in Mumbai is that there is a spectrum of contexts and situations across which information gets created, circulated/percolated and transmitted in particular forms and through exclusive networks and circuits. The spectrum of information gets created through this variety of contexts and the spectrum gets defined and redefined, time and again, in terms of the value and the criticality attributed to different kinds of information and therefore, the implications that are perceived to stem from hiding such information(s) and excluding different groups of people from accessing it. Assessing the implications of transparency, opacity and secrecy of information in different contexts becomes more complex when we understand how and why different actors and institutions within the state, in between the state-civil society complex, and a variety of other actors advocate for transparency and the vocabulary and manner in which they articulate claims and projects for transparency.<br /> <br />There is also the issue of <strong>scale of exposure</strong> of a particular scam or some other act of secrecy/‘insider’ information which leads us to assess transparency or the lack of it in highly normative and morally laden ways. For instance, the 3G scam acquired the issue of national importance because of the involvement of the national government in Delhi and a handful of corporations who gained vast sums of money in direct and indirect ways; the fact that the scam appeared as an act of cheating to several cell phone users in India and especially to the tax-paying publics who have already been articulating complaints about their entitlements with respect to poor quality or complete lack of government and municipal resources; the manner in which this scam was interpreted, analyzed and then communicated to the public through different media (newspapers, television, blogs, protests, etc). Whereas, the lack of transparency in the housing allotment process under the R&R policies’ implementation does not get the same kind of reactions and outcry by the same set of tax payers and citizenry base because of the scale of the issue and therefore, the exposure (something to think about), the disdain that exists among tax payers and citizens against slum dwellers, squatters and such ‘illegal’ groups and the widespread cynicism that resettled or rehabilitated squatters and slum dwellers will eventually go back to squatting and occupying public lands because this is their ‘inherent’ nature. The other, more important question, is whether the different kinds of ‘insider’ information(s) involved in the R&R implementation process should be made public because if these were made public, would the unfairness and ‘corruption’ in the process and the ambiguities that have emerged from the implementation be reversed? Even more importantly, do government agencies have the resources and the grasp to deal with reversing the survey and allotment process given that information concerning land is not only fuzzy but by nature is both incomplete and contested? And, following from the question of correcting wrongs and setting right the rights, does it imply that my analyses of the lack of transparency and the forms of ‘insider’ information in the R&R process actually legitimizes the corruption and inequities involved in allotments? (I deal with this question in a more detailed manner in the monograph.)<br /> <br />The other question that is connected with both the 3G scam and the problems with the R&R policy implementation process (and also the recent WikiLeaks and cablegate controversy surrounding the buying of elected representatives for the vote of confidence) is who are the people controlling information and what resources do they have at their disposal to hide or reveal some things to which publics? This question is not simply a matter of the BJP (Bhartiya Janata Party) having the financial and other resources at its disposal to engineer a plot for destabilizing the UPA (United Progressive Alliance) government. It is also a matter of say a licensing department in a municipality or a land and estates department in an urban governance set-up which is mired, by both default and design[<a href="#3">3</a>], in histories and presents of information inadequacies, information controls, claims (made by claimants from among citizens and state) and the corresponding access and/or lack of it to government resources and land/space. How do we evaluate/assess these departments’ acts of transparency and the lack of it as well as their strategies of information percolation, control and dissemination given their institutional and political context as well as the histories and the very kinds and nature of information that define and redefine their functioning?</p>
<p> Clearly then, we are talking about power – power relations and equations – here, and in this respect one would wonder what more does this monograph do other than discuss these power dynamics. But the monograph really does more than this. It tries to read these power dynamics in the context of how they inform and shape our understandings of information per se i.e., what constitutes information and how certain forms of information are made legitimate or illegitimate. The monograph also tries to analyze the notions and practices of authentication and certification of information that have come into being either directly or indirectly through mobilizations around access to information, use of information and rights of citizens, and how these efforts of authentication and certification shape the very nature of information and the politics around its production and transmission in different contexts. I must add here, therefore, that the monograph uses the term information technologies in a very broad sense even when it is covering a history of information technologies, mainly digital ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) such as databases, websites and e-governance. The monograph also looks at how these digital technologies get embedded within the existing and emerging technologies and institutions of governance and information production, circulation and percolation. Such an approach, I argue in the monograph, broadens the manner in which we view and evaluate digital technologies and their power as well as its appropriations (a term and practice discussed in much greater detail in the monograph) by different actors within the state and among the public.</p>
<p>There are two questions that I have to address before I close down this blog post. The first question is how I understand and define transparency and second is how I conceive politics. Transparency resides within the domain of information – the way in which information is produced (materially and symbolically), accessed, used, circulated, reproduced, appropriated, subverted and transmitted through various channels and mediums. I do not work with a single definition of transparency because as much as transparency is a desired norm, it is also a double-edged sword where the act of making something transparent has various kinds of repercussions, direct and indirect, on different strands of society. What I bring through this monograph is an urge to review transparency in more critical and thicker ways. This does not mean that we have to abandon the project of transparency altogether. Rather, we need to critically examine the emerging relationship between transparency, information and data and the increasing emphasis on ‘rational’ and ‘scientific data sets’ (such as budgetary analyses, certified information under the Right to Information (RTI) act, etc.) as the means of enforcing transparency and therefore, accountability – would not such transparency come with certain political costs for our society and who bears these costs and at what expense? This monograph therefore, examines transparency as a practice that has to be abstracted from the different contexts in which it is being applied, advocated and the manner in which claims for transparency are being advocated.</p>
<p>Politics – phew! Shall we get started on this? Of course! I will try and keep this brief. I started with explaining how there is a spectrum across which information exists. Politics also exists on a spectrum, and that spectrum is beyond one of ‘from petty corruption to high corruption’, from extortion of bribes by cops to 2G and 3G scams. At the moment, not only states within India and its central government, all parts of the globe are mired in various kinds of scandals and scams that are increasingly moving our thinking and even our faith into revolutions and radical overthrow of governments. At another end of the spectrum of our thinking and conception of politics is a strand of thinkers who have forced us to think about “quiet” (Bayat, 1997) and “insurgent” (Holston, 2008) politics, one that is articulated through very complex claims that arise and diminish in different contexts (Chatterjee, 2004; Benjamin, 1996, 2005, 2008). My task in this monograph is to explain this spectrum of politics, especially how it plays out in the context of transparency and information technologies. I will discuss the complexities of claims, autonomy, institutional politics and norms/ideals. The challenge of this monograph is to convince different stakeholders and the public to interrogate our notions of politics, and to instill a sense of optimism in a time which is an one interesting one for all of our lives and aspirations.</p>
<p> </p>
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<h3>Notes</h3>
<p class="discreet"><a name="1">1Mythri Prasad, Ph.D. Scholar, Centre for Development Studies (CDS), Trivandrum.</a></p>
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<p class="discreet"><a name="2">2Research conducted under the aegis of Delphi Research Services, Bangalore, and for the purposes of my doctoral dissertation.</a></p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="2"></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><a name="2">3 <span class="Apple-style-span">I am grateful to Narayana Gatty, faculty at Azim Premji University, for raising this issue of ‘default and design’ in the context of his research on e-governance and its impact on citizens and state agents.</span></a></span></p>
<a name="2">
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/transparency-politics-it-in-india'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/transparency-politics-it-in-india</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaResearch2011-08-03T09:59:15ZBlog EntryShadow Search Project (SSP) in CIS
http://editors.cis-india.org/events/shadow-search-in-cis
<b>CIS hosts an interesting line-up on the 18th of April with the Shadow Search Project (SSP). </b>
<p>Last year, <a class="external-link" href="http://northeastwestsouth.net/">n.e.w.s.</a> a collective online platform for the analysis and development of art-related activity organized an open call: Shadow Search, which was looking for a specific algorithm. In particular this search engine would allow prospectors in the world of information and databases to discover ‘shadow art activities’ that are partially hidden, off-the-radar, stealthy. Last year a jury gathered at CIS to evaluate the 5 entries and after much deliberation, a <a class="external-link" href="http://northeastwestsouth.net/shadow-search-winner-announced">winner</a> was chosen, 'Narcissus', by Phil Jones and Aharon Amir. This algorithm is now being launched at CIS on March 31, 2011.</p>
<p>The corpus of objects being tested by the Narcissus search engine is the data uploaded from the students from the Dutch Art Institute, Srishti School of Art, Design, Technology, Shantiniketan and CKP for 'Space: the <a class="external-link" href="http://spacethefinalfrontier.net/">final frontier</a>'. The past three weeks the students have been indexing the shadow worlds of Bangalore with various art projects, which were physically exhibited at CKP on March 17th, 2011. The Shadow Search Project (SSP) will continue at the Center for Experimental Media Arts (CEMA) at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology this year as a full-time project, in which various aspects of art-related activities as well as their visibility, searchability and accessibility will be investigated by participants and visiting faculty. </p>
<p>Also included in the day's activities is a discussion encircling the concept of 'search' with local guests (Nishant Shah, Prayas Abhinav, Renée Ridgway, T B Dinesh, Ajai Narendran) and those from abroad via Skype (Geert Lovink, Stephen Wright, Marijn de Vries Hoogerwerff) This is a continuation of a series of Skype chats from the past year in Amsterdam (INC) and Bangalore at CIS in which 'search' as a larger concept is being rethought. Now more than ever, in an era where Google hegemony is being tested by Facebook linkage and alternative search models are surfacing, we need to keep the 'world's knowledge' open and not proprietary. Please join us!</p>
<h3>Agenda</h3>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>16:00</td>
<td>Discussion in Skype during European lunch break time </td>
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<td> 17:30 </td>
<td> Launch of the Narcissus algorithm and how it works, Space the Final Frontier project</td>
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<td> 18:00</td>
<td> Shadow Search Platform: going further</td>
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</tbody>
</table>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/events/shadow-search-in-cis'>http://editors.cis-india.org/events/shadow-search-in-cis</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaResearch2011-04-04T06:54:12ZEventFacebook Resistance Workshop at CIS, Bangalore
http://editors.cis-india.org/events/facebook-resistance
<b>Facebook designing your online identity is like designing your rooms with furniture from the bazaar. The only individuality lies in your family pictures standing on the shelves. On Saturday, April 2, 2011, CIS is organising a workshop for people to learn on how to think beyond the rules and limitations of Facebook, to tweak and play around the features and design to generate useful, creative, and funny concepts and explore how this creative intervention can be turned into a real software developed by the Facebook Resistance.</b>
<div style="text-align: left;"><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Facebookresistance.jpg/image_preview" alt="Facebookresistance" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Facebookresistance" /></div>
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<p><span class="Apple-style-span">In the Web 2.0 world, most users of technology are reduced to being mere ‘users’. We are offered almost an endless number of choices but do not have the freedom to go against the ‘laws’ and ‘rules’ of the system we operate in. Take Facebook for example. Have you ever wondered if you can change the way Facebook works? Sure, we can start campaigns and mobilize people to impact some of the policies but we never think about the very design of Facebook and the laws that govern it.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span">What if you could change Facebook’s laws? In this workshop we begin modifying Facebook.com for ourselves, using the unique concept of “browser-hacks”. The aim is to think beyond the rules and limitations of Facebook’s software to generate useful, creative, and funny concepts. We further want to explore, how this creative intervention can also be turned into a real software developed by the Facebook Resistance.</span></p>
<p>Facebook Resistance is a research initiative accepting the status quo of Facebook being the dominant social identity management system, researching on the ways to change its rules and functionality from inside the system. Facebook sets the rules of how-to behave, so we’re asking: Are we happy with their interface, features and rules or do we want to change them? A change can be as trivial as adding a background-image. As initiator Tobias Leingruber (<a class="external-link" href="http://twitter.com/tbx">@tbx</a>), puts it: “Facebook designing your online identity is like IKEA designing your apartment. The only individuality lies in the family pictures standing in your BILLY shelves.” </p>
<p>While early online networks like Geocities.com encouraged its users to entirely modify their online presence, Myspace.com and Web 2.0 have steered this “User Generated Content” into a commercially valuable structure. Facebook has finalized this “evolution” by disabling the user to do anything but feeding the system that gives Facebook it’s estimated value of 50 Billion US$. Facebook is taking over the social web, and its design follows Mark Zuckerberg’s ideals. To quote Lawrence Lessig: “The code is law. The architectures of cyberspace are as important as the law in defining and defeating the liberties of the Net.” </p>
<h3>Trainer</h3>
<p>Marc Stumpel (<a class="external-link" href="http://twitter.com/zuurstof">@Zuurstof</a>) is a privacy/user-control advocate, holding a MA degree in New Media and Digital culture. He has recently discussed browser hacks in his thesis: </p>
<p>‘<a class="external-link" href="http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2010/09/04/the-politics-of-social-media-facebook-control-and-resistance/">The Politics of Social Media. Facebook: Control and Resistance</a>’, and continues to elaborate on this type of resistance while travelling in India. <a class="external-link" href="http://artzilla.org/">Several Facebook Resistance workshops</a> already took place in Europe, organized by initiator <a class="external-link" href="http://www.mediamatic.net/person/182073/en">Tobias Leingruber</a> (@tbx) a famous artist and free communication designer working in viral media, popular culture, amateur aesthetics and browser apps. </p>
<h3>Example Ideas</h3>
<ul><li>Dislike Button</li><li>Graffiti Wall (based on GML/webmarker.me)</li><li>Auto-comment generator (e.g. LOL or Kanye West speak)</li><li>Custom background images and visual css styling for your visitors</li><li>Themes, e.g. change your Facebook’s colour: pink, yellow…</li></ul>
<h3>Skill-set participants</h3>
<p>It would be great to have a few people with some web development experience (html/css/javascript), or Photoshop skills, but also people who can write good (philosophical) texts are very welcome. In the end everyone who really uses web 2.0 will fit in, so just come and join us!</p>
<h3>Information and registration</h3>
<p>We have place for 20 people. You can register by sending an email to digitalnatives [at] cis-india.org. The workshop takes place at the the Centre for Internet and Society on Saturday, April 2nd from 11.00 to 17.00 hr. There is no charge for taking part in the workshop, but make sure to bring your laptop or mobile computing devices with you. <br /><br />If you have questions please contact Marc Stumpel: m.stumpel[at]gmail.com.</p>
<p><strong>VIDEO</strong></p>
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<iframe src="http://blip.tv/play/AYLWxQ4A.html" frameborder="0" height="250" width="250"></iframe><embed style="display:none" src="http://a.blip.tv/api.swf#AYLWxQ4A" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/events/facebook-resistance'>http://editors.cis-india.org/events/facebook-resistance</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaResearch2011-10-21T08:24:19ZEvent