The Centre for Internet and Society
http://editors.cis-india.org
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CIS Cybersecurity Series (Part 4) - Marietje Schaake
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-4-marietje-schaake
<b>CIS interviews Marietje Schaake, member of the European parliament, as part of the Cybersecurity Series</b>
<div><em>"It is important that we don't confine solutions in military head quarters or in government meeting rooms but that consumers, internet users, NGOs, as well as businesses, together take responsibility to build a resilient society where we also don't forget what it is we are defending, and that is our freedoms... and we have learned hopefully from the war on terror, that there is a great risk to compromise freedom for alleged security and that is a mistake we should not make again." - Marietje Schaake, member of European parliament.</em></div>
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<div>Centre for Internet and Society presents its fourth installment of the CIS Cybersecurity Series.</div>
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<div>The CIS Cybersecurity Series seeks to address hotly debated aspects of cybersecurity and hopes to encourage wider public discourse around the topic.</div>
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<div>In this installment, CIS interviews Marietje Schaake, member of the European Parliament for the Dutch Democratic Party (D66) with the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) political group. She serves on the Committee on Foreign Affairs, where she focuses on neighbourhood policy, Turkey in particular; human rights, with a specific focus on freedom of expression, Internet freedom, press freedom; and Iran. In the Committee on Culture, Media, Education, Youth and Sports, Marietje works on Europe’s Digital Agenda and the role of culture and new media in the EU´s external actions. In the Committee on International Trade, she focuses on intellectual property rights, the free flow of information and the relation between trade and foreign affairs.</div>
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<div>Marietje's website is: http://www.marietjeschaake.eu/</div>
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<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/F7IIHCu2D4g" frameborder="0" height="315" width="560"></iframe></p>
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<p><strong><em>This work was carried out as part of the Cyber Stewards Network with aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.</em></strong></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-4-marietje-schaake'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-4-marietje-schaake</a>
</p>
No publisherpurbaCybersecurityCyberspaceCyberculturesCyber Security Interview2013-07-12T10:24:14ZBlog EntryCIS Cybersecurity Series (Part 3) - Eva Galperin
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-3-eva-galperin
<b>CIS interviews Eva Galperin, Global Policy Analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).</b>
<p><i>"It is a vital tool for speaking truth to power. Unless you are able to speak anonymously, you are not really free to espouse unpopular ideas to people who have the power to do bad things to do... I think the value of anonymous speech vastly outweighs the difficulties that you can sometimes get into because people can speak anonymously. And on the whole, I think anonymity is worth protecting." - Eva Galperin, Global Policy Analyst at EFF. </i></p>
<p>Centre for Internet and Society presents its third installment of the CIS Cybersecurity Series.</p>
<p>The CIS Cybersecurity Series seeks to address hotly debated aspects of cybersecurity and hopes to encourage wider public discourse around the topic.</p>
<p>In this installment, CIS speaks to Eva Galperin, the Global Policy Analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).She has worked for the EFF in various capacities for the last five years, applying the combination of her political science and technical background to organizing activism campaigns, and doing education and outreach on intellectual property, privacy, and security issues.</p>
<p>EFF homepage: <a href="https://www.eff.org/">https://www.eff.org/</a></p>
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<p><b><i>This work was carried out as part of the Cyber Stewards Network with aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.</i></b></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-3-eva-galperin'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-3-eva-galperin</a>
</p>
No publisherpurbaCyberspaceCybersecurityInternet GovernanceCyberculturesCyber Security Interview2013-08-01T09:55:23ZBlog EntryCIS Cybersecurity Series (Part 2) - Ram Mohan
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-2-ram-mohan
<b>CIS interviews Ram Mohan, a pioneer in the field of Internet security and internationalization, as part of the Cybersecurity Series</b>
<p><em>"In the Indian context, I think the government does have a significant responsibility to protect its citizenry from cybercrime. There is a greater need for the government to work with private industries as well as academic institutions to ensure a strong understanding of the threats unique to India. After all there are many threats that either originate in the context of the Indian sub-continent and are specific to India." - Ram Mohan, Executive Vice President, & Chief Technology </em><em>Officer of Afilias Limited.</em></p>
<p>Centre for Internet and Society presents its second installment of the CIS Cybersecurity Series.</p>
<p>The CIS Cybersecurity Series seeks to address hotly debated aspects of cybersecurity and hopes to encourage wider public discourse around the topic.</p>
<p>In this installment, CIS speaks to Ram Mohan, a pioneer in the field of Internet security and internationalization. Ram Mohan is Executive Vice President, & Chief Technology Officer of Afilias Limited. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).</p>
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<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Riub6EIwCgk" frameborder="0" height="315" width="560"></iframe></p>
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<p><strong><em>This work was carried out as part of the Cyber Stewards Network with aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.</em></strong></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-2-ram-mohan'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-2-ram-mohan</a>
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No publisherpurbaCybersecurityCyberspaceCyberculturesCyber Security Interview2013-07-12T10:27:26ZBlog EntryMy First Wikipedia Training Workshop – Theatre Outreach Unit, University of Hyderabad
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/my-first-wikipedia-training-workshop
<b>On March 8, 2013, a day-long Telugu Wikipedia training workshop was organized by the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team at the Golden Threshold, Nampally, Hyderabad in collaboration with Theatre Outreach Unit, University of Hyderabad. This blog post gives a concise account of the event.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b><a class="external-link" href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge">CIS-A2K</a></b> had planned a day long <a class="external-link" href="http://te.wikipedia.org">Telugu Wikipedia</a> training workshop in collaboration with Telugu Wikipedians at the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.efluniversity.ac.in/">English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU)</a>, Hyderabad on March 8, 2013. The intention was to target research students at EFLU who are using Telugu material or working on topics related to Telugu and Andhra Pradesh. This event was also to be part of the Wiki Women’s month events across India. However, this event had to be cancelled in the last minute as a Research Student of EFLU committed suicide on the campus and there was major unrest. The faculty from EFLU though had informed of the possible cancellation of the event earlier, had only confirmed it on March 7, 2013. <b><a class="external-link" href="http://te.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B0%B5%E0%B0%BE%E0%B0%A1%E0%B1%81%E0%B0%95%E0%B0%B0%E0%B0%BF:%E0%B0%B0%E0%B0%B9%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%AE%E0%B0%BE%E0%B0%A8%E0%B1%81%E0%B0%A6%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%A6%E0%B1%80%E0%B0%A8%E0%B1%8D">Rahmanuddin Shaik</a></b> (Telugu SIG, <a class="external-link" href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_India_chapter">Wikimedia India Chapter</a>) and <a class="external-link" href="http://te.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B0%B5%E0%B0%BE%E0%B0%A1%E0%B1%81%E0%B0%95%E0%B0%B0%E0%B0%BF:Rajasekhar1961"><b>Dr. Rajasekhar</b> </a>(Telugu Wikipedia Administrator) had already blocked an entire day for this training workshop. In fact a lot of background work was already done for the EFLU event.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">When I got the news of cancellation of the workshop, initially I was very dejected at the thought of informing the two active Telugu Wikipedians about it, which I had to do. As my tickets were anyhow booked to Hyderabad and there was no point cancelling them, as I was already on my way to catch the flight, I decided to go ahead with my journey. I made some couple of quick calls and with some effort managed to organize a Wikipedia Training Workshop in collaboration with the <a class="external-link" href="http://te.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B0%A5%E0%B0%BF%E0%B0%AF%E0%B1%87%E0%B0%9F%E0%B0%B0%E0%B1%8D_%E0%B0%94%E0%B0%9F%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%B0%E0%B1%80%E0%B0%9A%E0%B1%8D_%E0%B0%AF%E0%B1%82%E0%B0%A8%E0%B0%BF%E0%B0%9F%E0%B1%8D_%28%E0%B0%9F%E0%B0%BF.%E0%B0%93.%E0%B0%AF%E0%B1%81%29">Theatre Outreach Unit (TOU)</a>, <a class="external-link" href="http://www.uohyd.ac.in/">University of Hyderabad (UoH)</a>. I was anyhow planning on visiting them to explore an institutional collaboration. The Project Director of TOU Dr. Peddi Ramarao, though agreed to spread the word about the workshop, yet was not sure how many would turn up at such a short notice of one night.</p>
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<th><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/TOUphoto2forCIS.png" title="TOU Training photo 2" height="364" width="486" alt="null" class="image-inline" /></th> <th>
<p>Rahmanuddin and Dr. Rajasekhar giving hands-on training to edit Telugu Wikipedia at Golden Threshold, Hyderabad</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">So on March 8, 2013 Rahmanuddin, Dr. Rajasekhar and I landed at the <a class="external-link" href="http://te.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B0%97%E0%B1%8B%E0%B0%B2%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%A1%E0%B1%86%E0%B0%A8%E0%B1%8D_%E0%B0%A4%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%B0%E0%B1%86%E0%B0%B7%E0%B1%8B%E0%B0%B2%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%A1%E0%B1%8D">Golden Threshold</a> hoping against hope to see at least 3 or 4 participants. But alas there were only 2 people when we reached the venue by 10 a.m.. By 10.25 a.m. we had 9 participants, which excited us all. The training workshop began with an introduction of all the participants. Following this a presentation was made on the significance of Wikipedia in the digital era and how Indian language-Wikipedias are pivotal in preserving the vernacular language and culture. This session was interactive with participants asking many questions. Dr. Peddi Ramarao, later, spoke about his experience of using Wikipedia as a reference tool and how he got introduced to contributing Wikipedia. Further, the discussion went on to the poor quality of articles on Telugu Wikipedia and how the participants can take part in improving the existing articles and contribute new articles. Rahmanuddin and Rajasekhar practically demonstrated the process of editing on <a class="external-link" href="http://te.wikipedia.org">Telugu Wikipedia</a>. This was followed by a hands-on session where the participants actively participated in creating their Wikipedia User name on Telugu Wikipedia and did editing of few articles. The training programme was to officially end at Lunch time but even post lunch some of the participants were enthusiastic about learning more nuances of contributing on Telugu Wikipedia. The hands-on session thus continued until 4 p.m.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Post the Wikipedia training programme, I have had interactions with the Project Director of TOU to explore possible future collaborations. TOU, UoH agreed to offer space to host all Telugu Wikipedia meet-ups. As the Golden Threshold space was in the central part of the city, having this infrastructure accessible was a major boost for the Telugu Wikipedia community in Hyderabad. Further, in the discussions we have agreed to collaborate with TOU, UoH in hosting the first mega Telugu Wikipedia community event <i>Telugu Wiki Mahotsavam 2013</i>.</p>
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<th><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/TOUphoto3forCIS.png" title="TOU Training photo 3" height="261" width="348" alt="null" class="image-inline" /></th>
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<td><b>Telugu Wikipedia Orientation in progress</b></td>
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<h3><b>Outcomes and Impact:</b></h3>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Out of the 9 new Users, who were trained during this workshop, 5 people have done more than 5 edits.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">One person has become a very active editor on Telugu Wikipedia with more than 1000 edits in 3 months. A detailed account of this event was put up by this user on Telugu Wikipedia here <a href="#fn*" name="fr*">[*]</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Because of CIS-A2K’s efforts, Telugu Wikipedians in Hyderabad now have a good meeting space.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The availability of this space has also encouraged the Telugu Wikipedians to meet more often than before. Since March 8, 2013 Telugu Wikipedians had a total of 6 meet-ups, and all these were held at Golden Threshold.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Golden Threshold also became a venue for hosting <i>Telugu Wiki Mahotsavam 2013</i>.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">This visit to Hyderabad triggered a discussion about organizing <i>Telugu Wiki Mahotsavam</i>, which was successfully organized in a month’s time.</li>
</ol>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Looking back, though this event was done as a last minute measure without many expectations, yet it turned out to be a lucky break! Especially, because this was my first ever event as the CIS-A2K Programme Director. It will remain a very memorable one. More so because it was done in collaboration with two of the active Telugu Wikipedians. Even more so because it has created some positive energy for the Telugu Wikipedia community, which has since then become a home turf.</p>
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<p>[<a href="#fr*" name="fn*">*</a>]. <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/17WYq7X">http://bit.ly/17WYq7X</a></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/my-first-wikipedia-training-workshop'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/my-first-wikipedia-training-workshop</a>
</p>
No publishervishnuDigital ActivismArtAccess to KnowledgeDigital AccessWikimediaWikipediaCyberculturesTelugu WikipediaOpen ContentCommunitiesOpennessMeetingEvent2013-08-19T06:51:16ZBlog EntryCIS Cybersecurity Series (Part 1) - Christopher Soghoian
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-1-christopher-soghoian
<b>CIS interviews Christopher Soghoian, cybersecurity researcher and activist, as part of the Cybersecurity Series</b>
<p><em>"We live in a surveillance state. The government can find out who we communicate with, who we talk to, who we are near, when we are at a protest, which stores we go to, where we travel to... they can find out all of these things. And it's unlikely it's going to get rolled back, but the best we can hope for is a system of law where the government gets to use its powers only in the right situation." – Christopher Soghoian, American Civil Liberties Union.</em></p>
<p>Centre for Internet and Society presents its first installment of the CIS Cybersecurity Series.</p>
<p>The CIS Cybersecurity Series seeks to address hotly debated aspects of cybersecurity and hopes to encourage wider public discourse around the topic.</p>
<p>In this installment, CIS interviews Christopher Soghoian, a privacy researcher and activist, working at the intersection of technology, law and policy. Christopher is the Principal Technologist and a Senior Policy Analyst with the Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).</p>
<p>Christopher is based in Washington, D.C. His website is http://www.dubfire.net/</p>
<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/SQo4b-jTAWM" frameborder="0" height="315" width="320"></iframe></p>
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<p><strong><em>This work was carried out as part of the Cyber Stewards Network with aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.</em></strong></p>
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<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-1-christopher-soghoian'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-1-christopher-soghoian</a>
</p>
No publisherpurbaCybersecurityCyberspaceCyberculturesCyber Security Interview2013-07-12T10:26:59ZBlog Entry It’s Common Practice
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/indian-express-may-12-2013-nishant-shah-its-common-practice
<b>Technologies are no longer abstract. They're habits. What constitutes a habit? The gestures that you make as you read this, the way your eyes flick when you encounter somebody you like, the way you stroke your chin in a moment of reflection, or the split second decisions that you make in times of crises — these are all habits. They are pre-thought, visceral, depending upon biological, social and collective memories that do not need rational thinking. Habits are the customised programming of human life. </b>
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<p>Nishant Shah's column was <a class="external-link" href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/it-s-common-practice/1113490/0">published in the Indian Express</a> on May 12, 2013.</p>
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<p>However, habits are not natural. They are, in fact, man-made nature. They appear as natural, matter-of-fact, instinctive and intuitive, but they are built over years of shared experiences, learning and empathy. And more often than we realise, habits are formed because of the different technologies that surround us.</p>
<p>If you are reading this column on paper, look at the way you are holding the magazine, folding the paper and note how you can read this easily because the text has been arranged from left to right, top to bottom. If you are browsing through this piece on a digital device, look at how your fingers move on your scroll button, or on your touchscreen, helping you make sense of complex devices without a second thought.</p>
<p>Habits that are formed through technologies work so seamlessly because they make technologies transparent. They make us forget that there is a complex network of machines, devices, grids and information that shape our lives. Do you remember the time when you came across something online and didn't look for the 'Like' button that is now a part of everyday internet practice? Do you remember the last time you struggled to manage the cursor on your screen using a mouse? Do you realise how the mouse has already become obsolete and is now being replaced by other touch-and-flick devices for a new generation?</p>
<p>I recently encountered this habit when my three-going-on-90-year-old Kindle — the Amazon device I use to read books — fell in the hands of a six-year-old. Like many digital natives of her time, she is unfazed by technology and, as her parents confess, is much better at operating most things digital in the house than them. She thinks nothing of streaming her favourite cartoon show from a website. She is adept at customising the many screens on her father's smartphone and has accepted that specific movements of her fingers will produce information on brightly-lit touchscreens.</p>
<p>However, when she used my non-backlit, non-touch Kindle that requires buttons to be pushed, she faced acute frustration. After trying to scroll, flick, activate, zoom and pinch on the screen she flung it at me, bewildered and angry that her habits were suddenly redundant and challenged. I want to use this moment of reflection to understand how technologies are integral to our ways of living. Technologies are habits. You don't need to be online 24x7, constantly upgrading yourself to the latest version of Android to interact with technology. Instead, we need to think about technologies as outlets that allow us to think about who we are and how we relate to the world around us.</p>
<p>One way of looking at technology as habits is to see how we have started thinking of ourselves through metaphors of the machines that we use. For example, it's quite common to hear people complain about "lack of bandwidth" to describe busy schedules. We now think of ourselves as systems that need upgrading. Life has long been lived on windows through which we recycle ourselves.</p>
<p>If technologies are such an inseparable part of ourselves, maybe it is time to stop making a distinction between the human and the technological. It is time to stop thinking about technologies only in terms of gadgets that can be removed from our biological assemblage. And indeed, if we are ready to recognise these technologies as a part of being human, then we need to think of technology politics in a new way. The questions around piracy, privacy, intellectual property, proprietary technologies, openness, etc. which are relegated to the digital world are also questions of us. They are not external problems but are centrally shaping how we construct ourselves as humans. Through habits.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/indian-express-may-12-2013-nishant-shah-its-common-practice'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/indian-express-may-12-2013-nishant-shah-its-common-practice</a>
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No publishernishantDigital subjectivitiesCyberculturesResearchers at Work2015-04-24T11:41:47ZBlog EntryWhose Change Is It Anyway? | DML2013
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/nishant-shah-whose-change-is-it-anyway
<b>As a preparation for the DML conference, Nishant Shah had an interview with Howard Rheingold, a cyberculture pioneer, social media innovator, and author of "Smart Mobs. Nishant Shah is chair of 'Whose Change Is It Anyway? Futures, Youth, Technology And Citizen Action In The Global South (And The Rest Of The World)' track at DML2013. Here, he talks about shifts in citizen engagement in Indian politics and civics, and the underlying significance of these changes.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify;">"More and more, you have young people who are trying to come together, not merely to express discontent, but actually take action so that they can build the kinds of futures they want to occupy."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The 2013 DML conference will be held in March 14-16, 2013 in Chicago, Illinois. The conference is supported by the MacArthur Foundation and organized by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub located at the University of California's systemwide Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">More details about the DML2013 Conference and the Call For Workshop/Panel/Paper Proposals can be found at the conference website: <a class="external-link" href="http://dml2013.dmlhub.net">dml2013.dmlhub.net</a>.</p>
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<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Video</h3>
<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Q1ueRSm1TTw" frameborder="0" height="315" width="320"></iframe></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/nishant-shah-whose-change-is-it-anyway'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/nishant-shah-whose-change-is-it-anyway</a>
</p>
No publishernishantVideoCyberculturesResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-04-24T11:47:19ZBlog EntryDigital AlterNatives with a Cause?
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook
<b>Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society have consolidated their three year knowledge inquiry into the field of youth, technology and change in a four book collective “Digital AlterNatives with a cause?”. This collaboratively produced collective, edited by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen, asks critical and pertinent questions about theory and practice around 'digital revolutions' in a post MENA (Middle East - North Africa) world. It works with multiple vocabularies and frameworks and produces dialogues and conversations between digital natives, academic and research scholars, practitioners, development agencies and corporate structures to examine the nature and practice of digital natives in emerging contexts from the Global South. </b>
<p></p>
<p><strong>I</strong><strong>ntroduction</strong></p>
<p>In the 21<sup>st</sup>
Century, we have witnessed the simultaneous growth of internet and digital
technologies on the one hand, and political protests and mobilisation on the
other. Processes of interpersonal relationships, social communication, economic
expansion, political protocols and governmental mediation are undergoing a
significant transition, across in the world, in developed and emerging
Information and Knowledge societies.</p>
<p>The young
are often seen as forerunners of these changes because of the pervasive and
persistent presence of digital and online technologies in their lives. The “
Digital Natives with a Cause?” is a research inquiry that uncovers the ways in
which young people in emerging ICT contexts make strategic use of technologies
to bring about change in their immediate environments. Ranging from personal
stories of transformation to efforts at collective change, it aims to identify
knowledge gaps that existing scholarship, practice and popular discourse around
an increasing usage, adoption and integration of digital technologies in
processes of social and political change.</p>
<p><strong>Methodology</strong></p>
<p>In 2010-11,
three workshops in Taiwan, South Africa and Chile, brought together around 80
people who identified themselves as Digital Natives from Asia, Africa and Latin
America, to explore certain key questions that could provide new insight into
Digital Natives research, policy and practice. The workshops were accompanied
by a ‘Thinkathon’ – a multi-stakeholder summit that initiated conversations
between Digital Natives, academic researchers, scholars, practitioners,
educators, policy makers and corporate representatives to share learnings on
new questions: Is one born digital or does one become a Digital Native? How do
we understand our relationship with the idea of a Digital Native? How do
Digital Natives redefine ‘change’ and how do they see themselves implementing
it? What is the role that technologies play in defining civic action and social
movements? What are the relationships
that these technology based identities and practices have with existing social
movements and political legacies? How do we build new frameworks of sustainable
citizen action outside of institutionalisation?</p>
<strong>
</strong>
<p><strong>Rationale</strong></p>
<p>One of the
knowledge gaps that this book tries to address is the lack of digital natives’
voices in the discourse around them. In the occasions that they are a part of
the discourse, they are generally represented by other actors who define the
frameworks and decide the issues which are important. Hence, more often than
not, most books around digital natives concentrate on similar sounding areas
and topics, which might not always resonate with the concerns that digital
natives and other stake-holders might be engaged with in their material and
discursive practice. The methodology of the workshops was designed keeping this
in mind. Instead of asking the digital natives to give their opinion or recount
a story about what we felt was important, we began by listening to their
articulations about what was at stake for them as e-agents of change. As a
result, the usual topics like piracy, privacy, cyber-bullying, sexting etc.
which automatically map digital natives discourse, are conspicuously absent
from this book. Their absence is not deliberate, but more symptomatic of how
these themes that we presumed as important were not of immediate concerns to
most of the participants in the workshop who are contributing to the book<strong>.</strong></p>
<strong>
</strong>
<p><strong>Structure</strong></p>
<p>The
conversations, research inquiries, reflections, discussions, interviews, and
art practices are consolidated in this four part book which deviates from the
mainstream imagination of the young people involved in processes of change. The
alternative positions, defined by geo-politics, gender, sexuality, class,
education, language, etc. find articulations from people who have been engaged
in the practice and discourse of technology mediated change. Each part
concentrates on one particular theme that helps bring coherence to a wide
spectrum of style and content.</p>
<p><strong>Book 1: To Be: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/dnbook1/at_download/file" class="external-link">here</a></strong></p>
<strong>
</strong>
<p>The first
part, <em>To Be</em>, looks at the questions
of digital native identities. Are digital natives the same everywhere? What
does it mean to call a certain population ‘Digital Natives”? Can we also look
at people who are on the fringes – Digital Outcasts, for example? Is it
possible to imagine technology-change relationships not only through questions
of access and usage but also through personal investments and transformations?
The contributions help chart the history, explain the contemporary and give ideas
about what the future of technology mediated identities is going to be.</p>
<strong>Book 2: To Think: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/dnbook2/at_download/file" class="external-link">here</a></strong><strong>
</strong>
<p>In the
second section, <em>To Think,</em> the
contributors engage with new frameworks of understanding the processes,
logistics, politics and mechanics of digital natives and causes. Giving fresh
perspectives which draw from digital aesthetics, digital natives’ everyday
practices, and their own research into the design and mechanics of technology
mediated change, the contributors help us re-think the concepts, processes and
structures that we have taken for granted. They also nuance the ways in which
new frameworks to think about youth, technology and change can be evolved and
how they provide new ways of sustaining digital natives and their causes.</p>
<p><strong>Book 3: To Act: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/dnbook3/at_download/file" class="external-link">here</a></strong></p>
<p><em>To Act</em> is the third part that concentrates on stories
from the ground. While it is important to conceptually engage with digital
natives, it is also, necessary to connect it with the real life practices that
are reshaping the world. Case-studies, reflections and experiences of people
engaged in processes of change, provide a rich empirical data set which is
further analysed to look at what it means to be a digital native in emerging
information and technology contexts.</p>
<strong>
</strong>
<p><strong>Book 4: To Connect : Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/dnbook4/at_download/file" class="external-link">here</a></strong></p>
<p>The last
section, <em>To Connect</em>, recognises the
fact that digital natives do not operate in vacuum. It might be valuable to
maintain the distinction between digital natives and immigrants, but this
distinction does not mean that there are no relationships between them as
actors of change. The section focuses on the digital native ecosystem to look
at the complex assemblage of relationships that support and are amplified by
these new processes of technologised change.</p>
<p>We see this
book as entering into a dialogue with the growing discourse and practice in the
field of youth, technology and change. The ambition is to look at the digital
(alter)natives as located in the Global South and the potentials for social
change and political participation that is embedded in their interactions
through and with digital and internet technologies. We hope that the book
furthers the idea of a context-based digital native identity and practice,
which challenges the otherwise universalist understanding that seems to be the
popular operative right now. We see this as the beginning of a knowledge
inquiry, rather than an end, and hope that the contributions in the book will
incite new discussions, invoke cross-sectorial and disciplinary debates, and
consolidate knowledges about digital (alter)natives and how they work in the
present to change our futures<strong>.</strong></p>
<p><strong><a class="external-link" href="https://www.surveymonkey.com/MyAccount_Login.aspx">Click here</a> to order your copy. We invite readers to contribute reviews of an essay they found particularly interesting. Contact us: nishant@cis-india.org and fjansen@hivos.nl if you want more information, resources, or dialogues</strong></p>
<p>Nishant
Shah</p>
<p>Fieke
Jansen</p>
<p><strong>For media coverage and book reviews,</strong> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/media-coverage" class="external-link">read here</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook</a>
</p>
No publishernishantSocial mediaDigital ActivismRAW PublicationsCampaignDigital NativesAgencyBlank Noise ProjectFeaturedCyberculturesFacebookPublicationsBeyond the DigitalDigital subjectivitiesBooksResearchers at Work2015-04-10T09:22:29ZBlog 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 EntryOne for the avatar
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/one-avatar
<b>With increasing instances of online avatars being victimised, users who are part of these identities need to be protected against vicious attacks. 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. This article was published on April 3, 2011. </b>
<p>On March 21 the digital natives I worked with, across three continents, blogged to celebrate Human Rights Day in South Africa. The topic: What should be a right in the digital age? While the blogathon captured the diverse contexts and voices of digital natives around the globe, it got me thinking about the question of rights, technology and identity.</p>
<p>When it comes to technology-based rights — right to access, right to information, right to dis/connect, right to be online, right to privacy, etc. — there seems to be an understanding that these rights are granted to the person who engages with digital and internet technologies.</p>
<p>For instance, if somebody steals your identity online, you can ask for legal arbitration. The right of the physical user who is interacting with digital technologies is clearly violated. Similarly, other kinds of economic abuse through phishing or spam are also instances in which the right of the individual is clearly breached and hence justice can be dispensed.</p>
<p>However, in the wide world of the Web, things often become blurry. For those who simultaneously live their lives in the fused spaces of the physical and the digital, there are instances when violence takes place but there are no arbitrators for justice. One way of thinking about this, is by looking at the digital avatars that we create online. Avatars are generally visual simulations that people create for themselves to mark their presence on the Web. Within the more traditional digital interactions, avatars are straightforward — pictures of people, icons, brands, photographs of pets, cartoons, or even text based signatures . Within role-playing games and virtual immersive environments, avatars can be more adventurous, often taking up the form of fantasy bodies that the users might aspire to have.</p>
<p>These avatars, for digital natives, are extensions of the self and an integral part of their online presence. A lucrative industry sells digital amenities, luxuries and brands to clothe and accessorise the avatars, so that they resemble the real-life user. The users invest time, money and resources to create unique avatars. However, these avatars, which are a combination of hardware, software and wetware — part machine, part code, part human being, despite their very material presence, do not really have any rights of their own.</p>
<p>Because they are treated only as cultural products, they are looked at only as objects rather than as animated identities. Popular law and culture treat avatars as external and not related to the users who create them. Within a digital universe, when an avatar gets abused, there are no rights that it can claim in order to find safety or justice. Our understanding of digital rights are so tied to the idea of physical loss and injury that unless a material loss to the physical body can be demonstrated, it becomes difficult to actually invoke the rights of the victim.</p>
<p>For example, in social networking sites like Facebook, it is common for younger users to bully people from their schools. Instead of a direct physical attack on the person, a series of “Hate pages” crop up, where conversations which were hitherto restricted to the circle of friends, are now openly hosted, attacking one particular person. Even more subtle are the campaigns to “De-friend” people, making them social pariahs by not allowing them access to social cliques. A common practice has also been to spam the person’s account with so many unnecessary emails that they can no longer access their important mails, which get lost in the deluge. These are serious attacks, which have direct impacts on the victim’s social and mental state.</p>
<p>Because no obvious physical harm is done, because there is no straightforward attack on the person involved or a demonstrable loss to any physical person, these attacks go unnoticed and unresolved. Even when these claims are brought to the notice of authority, the victim is asked to “move on” because it is “merely the internet”.</p>
<p>It is time to realise that there is nothing “mere” about the internet and the world of digital social interaction. What happens to the online persona has direct and often horrifying consequences to bodies in the physical world. And it is time to think of the right of the avatar, so that the users, who are a part of these identities, can also be protected. If I had to choose, in the digital age, the right to be an avatar, would be the right to vote for.</p>
<div class="pullquote">Read the original in the Indian Express <a class="external-link" href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/one-for-the-avatar/770774/">here</a></div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/one-avatar'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/one-avatar</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaDigital subjectivitiesCyberculturesResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-05-14T12:19:34ZBlog EntryReflecting from the Beyond
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/reflecting-from-the-beyond
<b>After going ‘beyond the digital’ with Blank Noise through the last nine posts, the final post in the series reflects on the understanding gained so far about youth digital activism and questions one needs to carry in moving forward on researching, working with, and understanding digital natives. </b>
<p></p>
<p class="Normalfirstparagraph">Throughout
the series, I have argued the following points. <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/beyond-the-digital-understanding-digital-natives-with-a-cause" class="external-link">Firstly</a>, the 21<sup>st</sup>
century society is changing into a network society and that youth movements are
changing accordingly. I have outlined the gaps in the current perspectives used
in understanding the current form and proposed to approach the topic by going
beyond the digital: from a youth standpoint, exploring all the elements of
social movement, and based on a case study in the Global South – the uber cool
Blank Noise community who have embraced the research with open arms. The
methodology has allowed me to identify the newness in <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/talking-back-without-talking-back" class="external-link">youth’s approach to
social change</a> and <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/the-many-faces-within" class="external-link">ways of organizing</a>. Although I do not mean to generalize,
there are some points where the case study resonates with the broader youth
movement of today. In this concluding post, I will reflect on how the research
journey has led me to rethink several points about youth, social change, and
activism.</p>
<p>While
social movements are commonly imagined to aim for concrete structural change,
many youth movements today aim for social and cultural change at the intangible
attitudinal level. Consequently, they articulate the issue with an intangible
opponent (the mindset) and less-measurable goals. Their objective is to raise
public awareness, but their approach to social change is through creating
personal change at the individual level through engagement with the movement.
Hence, ‘success’ is materialized in having as many people as possible involved
in the movement. This is enabled by several factors.</p>
<p>The
first is the Internet and new media/social technologies, which is used as a
site for community building, support group, campaigns, and a basis to allow
people spread all over the globe to remain involved in the collective in the
absence of a physical office. However, the cyber is not just a tool; it is also
a public space that is equally important with the physical space. Despite acknowledging
the diversity of the public engaged in these spaces, youth today do not
completely regard them as two separate spheres. Engaging in virtual community
has a real impact on everyday lives; the virtual is a part of real life for
many youth (Shirky, 2010). However, it is not a smooth ‘space of flows’
(Castells, 2009) either. Youth actors in the Global South do recognize that
their ease in navigating both spheres is the ability of the elite in their
societies, where the digital divide is paramount. The disconnect stems from
their <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/the-class-question" class="external-link">acknowledgement</a> that social change must be multi-class and an expression
of their reflexivity in facing the challenge.</p>
<p>The
second enabling factor is its highly individualized approach. The movement
enables people to personalize their involvement, both in terms of frequency and
ways of engagement as well as in meaning-making. It is an echo of the age of
individualism that youth are growing up in, shaped by the liberal economic and
political ideologies in the 1990s India
and elsewhere (France,
2007). Individualism has become a new social structure, in which personal decisions
and meaning-making is deemed as the key to solve structural issues in late
modernity (<em>Ibid).</em></p>
<p>In this era, young
people’s lives consist of a combination of a range of activities rather than
being focused only in one particular activity (<em>Ibid). </em>This is also the case in their social and political
engagement. Very few young people worldwide are full-time activists or
completely apathetic, the mainstream are actually involved in ‘everyday
activism’ (Bang, 2004; Harris et al, 2010). These are young people who are
personalizing politics by adopting causes in their daily behaviour and
lifestyle, for instance by purchasing only Fair Trade goods, or being very involved
in a short term concrete project but then stopping and moving on to other activities.
The emergence of these everyday activists are explained by the dwindling authority
of the state in the emergence of major corporations as political powers
(Castells, 2009) and youth’s decreased faith in formal political structures
which also resulted in decreased interest in collectivist, hierarchical social
movements in favour of a more individualized form of activism made easier with
Web 2.0 (Harris et al, 2010).</p>
<p>A collective of
everyday activists means that there are many forms of participation that one
can fluidly navigate in, but it requires a committed leadership core recognized
through presence and engagement. As Clay Shirky (2010: 90) said, the main
cultural and ethical norm in these groups is to ‘give credit where credit is
due’. Since these youth are used to producing and sharing content rather than
only consuming, the aforementioned success of the movement lies on the leaders’
ability to facilitate this process. The power to direct the movement is not
centralized in the leaders; it is dispersed to members who want to use the
opportunity.</p>
<p>This form of
movement defies the way social movements have been theorized before, where
individuals commit to a tangible goal and the group engagement directed under a
defined leadership. The contemporary youth movement could only exist by staying
with the intangible articulation and goal to accommodate the variety of
personalized meaning-making and allow both personal satisfaction and still
create a wider impact; it will be severely challenged by a concrete goal like
advocating for a specific regulation. Not all youth there are ‘activist’ in the
common full-time sense, for most everyday activists their engagement might not
be a form of activism at all but a productive and pleasurable way to use their
free time<span class="MsoFootnoteReference">
</span> - or, in Clay Shirky’s term, cognitive surplus
(2010).</p>
<p>Revisiting my
initial intent to put the term activism under scrutiny, I acknowledge this as a
call for scholars to re-examine the concepts of activism and social movements
through a process of de-framing and re-framing to deal with how youth today are
shaping the form of movements. Although the limitations of this paper do not
allow me to directly address the challenge, I offer my own learning from this
process for the quest of future researchers.</p>
<p>The way young
people today are reimagining social change and movements reiterate that
political and social engagement should be conceived in the plural. Instead of
“Activism” there should be “activisms” in various forms; there is not a new
form replacing the older, but all co-existing and having the potential to
complement each other. Allowing people to cope with street sexual harassment
and create a buzz around the issue should complement, not replace, efforts made
by established movements to propose a legislation or service provision from the
state. This is also a response I offer to the proponents of the aforementioned
“doubt” narrative.</p>
<p>I share the more
optimistic viewpoint about how these new forms are presenting more avenues to
engage the usually apathetic youth into taking action for a social cause.
However, I also acknowledge that the tools that have facilitated the emergence
of this new form of movement have existed for less than a decade; thus, we
still have to see how it evolves through the years.</p>
<p>Hence, I also find
the following questions to be relevant for proponents of the “hope” narrative.
Social change needs to cater to the most marginalized in the society, but as
elaborated before, the methods of engagement both on the physical and virtual
spaces are still contextual to the middle class. Therefore, how can the
emerging youth movements evolve to reach other groups in the society? Since
most of these movements are divorced from existing movements, how can they
synergize with existing movements to propel concrete change? These are open questions
that perhaps will be answered with time, but my experience with Blank Noise has
shown that these actors have the reflexivity required to start exploring
solutions to the challenges.</p>
<p>The research
started from a long-term personal interest and curiosity. In this journey, I
have found some answers but ended up with more questions that will also stay
with me in the long term. As a parting note before, I would like to share a
quote that will accompany my ongoing reflection on these questions.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><em>My advice to
other young activists of the world: study and respect history... but ultimately
break the mould. There have never been social media tools like this before. We
are the first generation to test them out: to make the mistakes but also the
breakthrough.</em></p>
<p align="right" style="text-align: right;">(Tammy
Tibbetts, 2010)</p>
<p class="Heading1notchapter"> </p>
<p><em>This is the </em><strong><em>tenth and final</em></strong><em> post in the <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/the-beyond-the-digital-directory" class="external-link"><strong>Beyond
the Digital </strong>series,</a> a research project that aims to explore
new insights to understand youth digital activism conducted by Maesy Angelina
with Blank Noise under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge Programme.</em></p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p><em>References:</em></p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p>Bang, H.P. (2004) ‘Among everyday makers and expert citizens’. Accessed
21 September 2010. <a href="http://www.sam.kau.se/stv/ksspa/papers/bang.pdf">http://www.sam.kau.se/stv/ksspa/papers/bang.pdf</a></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Castells, M. (2009) <em>Communication
Power. </em>New York: Oxford University
Press.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>France, A. (2007) <em>Understanding Youth in Late Modernity</em>. Berkshire:
Open University Press.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Harris, A., Wyn, J., and Younes, S. (2010) ‘Beyond apathetic or
activist youth: ‘Ordinary’ young people and contemporary forms of
participaton’, <em>Young </em>Vol. 18:9, pp.
9-32</p>
<p>Shirky, C. (2010) <em>Cognitive Surplus:
Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. </em>London: Penguin Press</p>
<p> </p>
<p><em>Image source:</em></p>
<p><a href="http://blog.blanknoise.org/2009/08/street-signs.html">http://blog.blanknoise.org/2009/08/street-signs.html</a></p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/reflecting-from-the-beyond'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/reflecting-from-the-beyond</a>
</p>
No publishermaesyCyberspaceDigital ActivismDigital NativesStreet sexual harassmentBlank Noise ProjectCyberculturesBeyond the DigitalYouthResearchers at Work2015-05-14T12:21:29ZBlog EntryWatson knows the Question
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/watson-knows
<b>Now that an algorithm has given humans a run for their money on a quiz show, it’s time to rethink the idea of a machine. 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. This article was published on March 6, 2011.</b>
<p>Quantum theory suggests that multiple universes exist where every possible alternative can come true. If this were the case, somewhere there must be a world filled with machines that are looking at human evolution and figuring out new and advanced human machine relationships. Or for those who are not very quantum minded, imagine a world where machines are the evolved species and they depend upon human technology — emotional connections, semantic learning, etc. — for their daily transactions and survival. I am not suggesting a futuristic dystopia, like the kind that science fiction specialises in. However, it would be interesting to imagine a world where technology is not only at the periphery of human civilisation but at the centre of it.</p>
<p>I am proposing this world view to revisit the idea of a digital native. We have, so far, in scholarship and practice, education and policy, only looked at digital natives as young human beings who interact in new and innovative ways with evolving technologies, to form human-machine networks and assemblages. However, as Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence Augmentation develop to produce thinking technologies, it is time to start looking at being sapient as not necessarily a human condition.</p>
<p>Early last month, an artificially created super computing system called Watson (elementary, surely?) took the world by a storm as it competed against two human contestants on a popular American quiz show called Jeopardy! The trivia-based show provides answers clustered around a particular theme, and contestants have to ask the correct question to the answer, to win prize money. It is not a straightforward question-answer show because it relies on more than human memory and recollection. It gives cryptic clues (like the ones we are used to in a crossword), offers semantic relationships which need more than just a database memory, and relies on the contestants’ abilities to make creative connections between the clues in order to guess the right questions.</p>
<p>Watson, a product of seven years of research by IBM Research, works on an algorithm which simulates human language and cognitive patterns to make intelligent connections and deductions to understand the context of the clues and then provide answers. Powered by 2,800 super powered computers on a high-speed network, Watson competed against Jeopardy!’s biggest champions and made history as it showed extraordinary human learning and predictive powers. It has been one of the biggest achievements in advanced computing to develop an algorithm that mimics human learning and has changed the way in which we look at the human-machine relationship.</p>
<p>While much commentary on Watson revolves around what it means to be human, and subsequently, what it is to be a digital native, I have a different proposition to make. Perhaps, Watson’s debut on American television is not only about thinking what is human, but also about what it means to be a machine.</p>
<p>First, the Watson that appeared on TV was a sleek display screen that stood behind a lectern in the studio along with the human contestants. The original Watson was next door, being cooled by refrigeration units, but it appeared to the human audience (in and outside the studio) in its avatar. This was a radically new idea because we have always thought of the avatar as a technology based representation of human users. We find avatars on Facebook and in online role-playing games. To think of a machine appearing in a human form was radically new.</p>
<p>Second, Watson was not able to just make predictions by mining information. It was also able to display levels of confidence. If Watson was not confident about an answer, it did not push the buzzer to answer. In fact, once the information was harvested, it displayed its top three guesses to show that, like human contestants, it calculated risks of wrong answers.</p>
<p>Third, Watson was able to display or at least simulate human emotions. It took guesses even when in doubt. It showed a spirit of adventure and played big. It was disappointed when it lost or was happy when it got the answers. It was able to display its “emotions” through various displays in its form and could get the audience’s attention, applause and support.</p>
<p>What this experiment suggests to me is that Watson is perhaps a digital native. All our concentration has always been on human subjects, but synthetic life forms and technology-based intelligence, are blurring this distinction between humans and technologies. We should start thinking of a digital native as neither machine nor human being, but a combination of the two, residing simultaneously in both the realms of the physical and the digital. Watson is perhaps a new digital native, a technology that is growing and slowly learning from its interactions with the human world around it. One of these days, we might be living in the midst of computational devices, which, when we are flummoxed, might turn to us and say, “Elementary, my dear Sherlock!”</p>
<p>Contact: digitalnative@expressindia.com</p>
<p>Read the original in the Indian Express <a class="external-link" href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/watson-knows-the-question/757315/1">here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/watson-knows'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/watson-knows</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaCyberculturesResearchers at Work2015-05-14T12:24:38ZBlog EntryChange has come to all of us
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/change-has-come
<b>The general focus on a digital generational divide makes us believe that generations are separated by the digital axis, and that the gap is widening. There is a growing anxiety voiced by an older generation that the digital natives they encounter — in their homes, schools and universities and at workplaces — are a new breed with an entirely different set of vocabularies and lifestyles which are unintelligible and inaccessible. It is time we started pushing the boundaries of what it means to be a digital native. </b>
<p><strong>In this connected world, the geek is everyone — from a grandma on Skype to a teen on Second Life.</strong></p>
<p>Two self-proclaimed digital natives,
on a cold autumn morning in Amsterdam, decided to leave the comforts of
their familiar virtual worlds and venture into the brave new territories
of real-life shopping. Though slightly confused by the lack of
click-and-try options and perplexed by the limitations of the physical
spaces of shopping, we plodded along, shop after shop, thinking how much
easier it is to chat on IM while flying through Second Life as opposed
to face-to-face interactions while walking on crowded streets. After we
had run out of shops (and patience), we decided that it was time to rely
on better resources than our own wits. The Dutch girl fished out her
Android smartphone and with the single press of a button, opened up
channels of information. She called her mother. She asked for the
location of the store that was eluding us. And then she looked at me in
silence before bursting into laughter. Her 64-year-old mother, in
response to our question, had said, “Why don’t you just Google it?” <br /></p>
<p>We spent five minutes in stunned
laughter when we realised that we should have instinctively done that
and that we were being asked by somebody from Generation U to “get with
it”. Funny (and slightly embarrassing) as it is, it brings into focus,
the question, “Who is a digital native?” For those of you who have been
reading this column, it has been defined in terms of age and usage. A
digital native is generally somebody young, somebody who is tech-savvy,
somebody who can perform complicated calisthenics with digital
technologies — throwing virtual sheep, having instant relationships,
writing complex stories and pirating their favourite movies — in one
nonchalant click of the mouse. However, these kinds of digital natives
are only stereotypes.
</p>
<p>If we move away from
these descriptions of novelty, of excitement and of youth, a different
kind of digital native emerges for us. A digital native is somebody
whose way of thinking (about himself and the world around) is
significantly informed because of the presence of and familiarity with
the internet and digital technologies. In other words, a digital native
is a person who has experienced (and is often led to) change because of
their interactions with new technologies.
</p>
<p>It can be a
middle-aged man whose business changed when he started tracking his
supplies using complex and sophisticated databases. It can be a mother
of two, finding support and help raising her children on online
communities like Bing. It can be a senior teacher re-discovering
pedagogy through distributed knowledge systems on Wikipedia. It can be
grandparents who interact with their grandchildren over Skype and text
messaging, across international borders and lifestyles. It can be a
mother telling her digital native daughter to “just Google it!” over the
cellphone.
</p>
<p>And as things might
be, Shamini, my 15-year-old bonafide digital native correspondent from
Ahmedabad, recently wrote that she got off Facebook and deleted her
account. “It felt like I had retired from a job,” she said. But she was
away from Facebook only for four months, dissociated from all the “time,
energy and drama that it caused” and was quite enjoying it. After four
months of self-imposed exile, she, however, resurfaced on Facebook. And
it was to stay in touch with her aunt and uncle, who live in faraway
lands, and cannot keep in touch with her unless she is on Facebook.
Shamini was surprised at this. After spending much time convincing them
about trying to use email and phones to keep connected, she finally gave
in and started a new account that nobody knows of. And she asked me the
important question: Who is the digital native now?
</p>
<p>The general focus on
a digital generational divide makes us believe that generations are
separated by the digital axis, and that the gap is widening. There is a
growing anxiety voiced by an older generation that the digital natives
they encounter — in their homes, schools and universities and at
workplaces — are a new breed with an entirely different set of
vocabularies and lifestyles which are unintelligible and inaccessible.
It is time we started pushing the boundaries of what it means to be a
digital native.
</p>
<p>My grandmother used
to tell us, “Nobody is born knowing a language.” I think it is time to
start applying the same logic here. Nobody is born with technologies.
But there are people — perhaps not yet a generation, but still a
population — who are changing their lives and significantly transforming
the world by turning Google and Facebook and Twitter into verbs and a
way of doing things. So the next time, somebody asks you if you know a
digital native, don’t look for somebody out there — it might just be
you! <br /></p>
<p>The original column can be read in <a class="external-link" href="http://http://www.indianexpress.com/news/change-has-come-to-all-of-us/701505/0">The Indian Express</a><br /></p>
<p> </p>
<strong></strong>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/change-has-come'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/change-has-come</a>
</p>
No publishernishantGoogleDigital NativesCyberculturesFacebookDigital subjectivities2012-03-13T10:43:38ZBlog EntryThe Binary: City and Nature
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/the-binary
<b>A continuation of the last post wherein I am looking at various other representation of the city in both classical and popular medium, today I am writing my views on the analysis of certain Miniature paintings.</b>
<p>You might think why do I not come to the point of looking at the Internet and the City ? I am trying here to look at generic aspects of representation of 'cities' in other mediums as well. The aim would be to understand both historical as well as contemporary popular patterns in such representations. Other mediums such as cinema, television and print are well documented and one could look into secondary studies to understand patterns within representation of space in general and city in particular. So a first hand study of various miniature paintings, can help us tease out the issues associated around representation of space. I am assuming the conceptual basis of a representation might be same irrespective of medium or sometimes even time period. For example, I have listed out how the juxtaposing of different context in one fictitious representation in street posters is an important phenomenon that aims at lifting the present state of imagination to a different level/ world whereby creating a condition far removed from the context of its production but still very much part of us. See the first report for an elaborate account of posters and textbook representations.</p>
<p>Miniature paintings of various schools within India (Rajasthan, Kangra, Madhubani) have been an important documentation on the life and times of the place and its people. I have picked up the Rajasthani Miniature tradition to try and understand issues around representation of the city. Let me clarify on what I mean when I refer to a “city”.</p>
<p><strong>City as a Cultural Concept</strong>: A settlement with its houses, streets, public buildings and markets, etc., is the stage for a complex social, economic and political negotiations. It is the arena where individual and groups are constantly engaged in charting, modifying and testing ideas of production in material or non-material terms. It is the place, where people with different skills, varied cultural background and divergent belief systems come together to forge a common identity and yet retaining something of their own connecting them back to their “native” town. Yes, it is still not very uncommon to be asked about ones “native” in public schools in India.. A question that tries to locate you with your region irrespective of your present identity. This meliu of different people, contradictory systems and varied aspirations creates a state of constant negotiations and flux that gives rise to what we call as the ingenuity of a city; be it arts, literature, engineering, performance or governance. So city really is not about size or spread or population. It is really about a set of relationship that shows immense complex attributes of social and material culture in a limited space.</p>
<h2>Readings from Miniature Paintings</h2>
<h3>Imagined Geometry in a City</h3>
<p>Cities are represented through use of geometry; a man-made system to organize and visualize the surroundings. Geometry becomes the basis to attain clarity. With the absence of perspective, the use of geometry becomes even more creative and division of paintings into various planes allows immense variation of expressions. But part of the city like streets, sidewalks, palaces, houses are all neatly placed in geometrical orthogonal planes. The character of the space is then attained not by photographic representation but juxtaposing and shifting of planes. The reliance of geometry for creation of the image is not only utilitarian but symbolic as well. It is in fact a statement on how they perceive the city and the surrounding nature. <strong>Geometry complements what is missing in nature.</strong> A visual order that is <strong>predictable and symbolic of the human will</strong> in face of harsh unforgiving surroundings.</p>
<p>Thus, the creative play of planes creates <strong>a sense of illusion, mystery and spontaneity usually associated with Indian cities</strong>. These paintings are a good example of non realistic expressions of the space that capture the spirit of the place from both spatial and cultural perspective. The <strong>question of modes of spatial representation and its relationship with the physical space</strong> is one that even concerns our study when we discuss how cities are represented on the Internet.</p>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span">
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Figure 1 Geometric Clarification </th>
</tr>
</tbody>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td> <img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Figure1.jpg/image_preview" alt="Geometric Clarification" class="image-inline" title="Geometric Clarification" /></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</span></p>
<h3>Nature and the City</h3>
<p>Similar to the search in posters, I tried to look for a very fundamental relationship of cities with nature in the Miniature painting traditions. It becomes very obvious, while pouring through different painting styles of India that city and nature were posited in a binary relationship. Nature is the anti-thesis to the city. Nature was wild with dense forests, dark clouds, water and animals whereas cities were organized by citizens.</p>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Figure 2 Representation of Nature</th>
</tr>
</tbody>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td> <img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Figure2.jpg/image_preview" alt="Representation of Nature" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Representation of Nature" /></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table class="invisible">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Figure 3 The Binary: City and Nature</th>
</tr>
</tbody>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td> <img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Figure3.jpg/image_preview" alt="The Binary: City and Nature" class="image-inline image-inline" title="The Binary: City and Nature" /></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p><br />Nature was also the ground for forays by men and their army or the acetic but they all came back to the city. So <strong>city was the refuge</strong> for mankind and its civilization. Nature was wild, rich and also unpredictable. But still there are patterns in nature that humans understand; the waves of the water, the vegetation cover of the trees, the dance of the rains. <strong>Cities were the viewpoints from where nature that exists outside were seen.</strong> The dichotomy of the city and the surrounding forms the backdrop of most visual expression dealing with the space.</p>
<p><em>All pictures from Garden of Cosmos, The Royal paintings of Jodhpur. Thames and Hudson Publication</em>.</p>
<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/the-binary'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/the-binary</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaCybercultures2011-08-02T06:05:53ZBlog EntrySexuality, Queerness and Internet technologies in Indian context
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/queer-histories-of-the-internet/sexuality-queerness-and-internet-technologies-in-indian-context
<b>This blog post lays out the discursive construction of sexuality and queerness as intelligible domains in the Indian context while engaging with ideas of visibility, representation, exclusion, publicness, criminality, difference, tradition, experience, and community that have come into use with the critical responses to queer identities and practices in India. </b>
<h2>In Brief</h2>
<p>To understand the relationship between queerness and Internet technologies we must start with a critical analysis of what ‘queer’ inaugurates in the Indian context and to think forward from there with the technological— a thinking forward that is removed from a purely calculable instrumentality. What we will in this post try to argue is that practices of same-sex love in the Indian context operates through a setting up of sexual and nonsexual spaces for expression of same-sex desires and towards the end of this post attempt to delineate instances in the spatial domain of cyber space where this enframing is revealed. Simultaneously we will also then set up the critically queer as a mode of encountering and negotiating the domain of the sexual in the nonsexual.</p>
<h2>Sexuality in the Indian context</h2>
<p>The last four decades has seen the particular reiteration of the ‘gender and sexuality’ frame in the social sciences in India. As Mary E John and Janaki Nair in their introduction to ‘A Question of Silence’ note, sexuality since the 1980s “tended to condense into the more specific question of sexual preference associated with identity politics of the gay and lesbian communities.” The claim has been that this discourse has, in the Foucauldian sense, led to structuring the possible field of the action of people. This emergence of the sexuality question in India has not come with a rigorous examination of ‘sexuality’ as an intelligible domain in the Indian context. Here domain refers to a discursive space that is contingent on the theoretical existence of certain phenomena. Queer studies in the west have set up sexuality as a domain that cuts across social disciplines. As Eve Sedgwick puts it, "[A]n understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition." (Epistemology of the Closet, 1990) The question, then, is if this condition of analysis is also true for the non-West.</p>
<p>The emergence of gay and lesbian politics in India is tied to a development discourse that saw in the post-stonewall assertion of sexuality identities a radical potential that was, as yet, missing in the Indian context. The mushrooming of support groups as noted in Shakuntala Devi’s book ‘The World of Homosexuals’ as far back as the 1980s notes the critical function of pedagogy that they performed by creating a discourse of sexuality and identity. This is evidenced even today when people who introduce their homosexual orientation by describing it as a field they entered at a particular point in their lives are corrected to describe it ‘accurately’ as an orientation in the identitarian sense of the word; our Marxist legacies pointing to a false consciousness of their own experience and locating practices firmly within the domain of sexuality. Similarly an assertion that uses the phrase ‘doing gay sex’ is corrected to ‘being gay’. Another instance where practices are seen as inhering in identity is the familiar scene of a practicing homosexual man or woman who has pointed out the schizophrenic nature of being married to the opposite sex while still continuing to do ‘gay sex’. In fact, most, frameworks of peer counselling set up in the metros are infused with various degrees of pathologisations that reify identity ignoring aspects of social relations altogether.</p>
<p>The new left project that is best exemplified in the writings of John D Emilio— that attempted a structural approach to oppression based on sexuality by looking at the heterosexual family as an institution that reproduces capitalist ideology in the modern world, also gains currency in the field of resistance that marks rights based sexuality activism in India which draws much from an already existing global network of Marxist thinking and practice. In this argument heterosexual coupling is seen as the primary institution that disciplines us into the binaries of male and female sexed subject positions through a fixing of the woman as mother and wife valuing them as reproducers of labourers over their production as labourers and a containment of male sexuality through monogamy and normative heterosexuality wherein homosexuality is then seen as being disruptive of this reproduction of the form of sexual economy that is both a product of and reproduces modern capitalism.</p>
<p>Emerging from these constructions was also another academic procedure in the construction of homosexualities outside the west which was to discover a tradition of same-sex relations. Geeti Thadani’s Sakhiyani: L<em>esbian Desire in Ancient and Modern India</em> and Ruth Vanitha and Saleem Kidwai’s <em>Same-Sex Love in India</em> are examples of this. Geeti Thadani poses a pre-modern utopia of gynefocal same-sex love between women (named lesbian as well) that were put paid to by Islam, colonialism and shifts in Hinduism.</p>
<p><em>Same-sex Love in India</em> explicitly seeks to tackle the contemporary claim that homosexual behaviours are alien imports from the west. Even when they speak of passion, erotic emotion, love as opposed to sex, shame as opposed to guilt they rarely set out to explain these in terms of social relations and construct these ideas as pre-colonial realities that are disrupted by colonial modernity. The authors state in their introduction about the work’s mission to “help assure homo-erotically inclined Indians that large numbers of their ancestors throughout history and in all parts of the country shared their inclinations and were honoured and successful members of the society who contributed in major ways to thought, literature and their general good. These people were not regarded as inferior in any way nor were they always ashamed of their loves or desires. In many cases they lived happy and fulfilling lives with those that they loved.”</p>
<h2>The <em>Khoti</em> and the <em>Hijra</em></h2>
<p>The search for indigenous categories has also led us to the <em>kothi</em> and the <em>hijra</em>. Categories marked as traditional and remainders, we are told, of the pre-colonial and pre-modern. The <em>hijra</em> is offered two possible positions. A possible translation through a transnational medico-legal discourse into the transsexual or the inter-sexed or under a cultural citizenship model into the institutionalised or culturally intelligible tradition of a third gender, who are, to quote Serena Nanda, “…neither male nor female but contain elements of both”.</p>
<p>In medical science the becoming of the <em>hijra</em> is explained as a gender identity disorder— a confusion over the apparent misfit between biological sex (of which there are only two) and a psychological true gender (again only two). Biological men who identify themselves as women are <em>hijras</em>— an identification that is made possible only through institutionalised relationships of power, in particular the power of relegation, which psychiatric discourse in India too reproduces to a large extent.</p>
<p>Narratives of <em>hijras</em> who state that if they only knew that men could have sex with other men as men then they would not have opted for castration is something we would find hard to illuminate in the translations effected on these bodies by the present categorisations of hijraness as transgender/transsexual/M2F/third gender all of which fundamentally cannot allow for such a claim. Such a narrative is a question posed in relation to knowledge about ‘gayness’ as identity and more importantly as the visibly dominant identity within the broad spectrum of alternatives. The medico-legal discourse of course now can jump in, and who is to say that it hasn’t already, to claim that the scientific knowledge that enables them to recognise gender identity disorder would have prevented such misrecognition and the ensuing decision to castrate.</p>
<p>So from a colonial practice that saw <em>hijras</em> as a criminal tribe and criminalised emasculation in 1888 and later also listed emasculation in the IPC as a criminal offence we have now a medical science that claims for itself to be the sole arbiter of gender identity. The many stories of the violence of medical practices that rarely grant recognition of gender identity disorder for years on end and instead identify a horde of other psychological illnesses such as schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder, etc as the true disorder are but indicative of the substantive ways in which such knowledge systems affect lives. We still need to consider if epistemic force fields have no effect whatsoever in relation to the modernisation of these categories as distinct identities in relation to the state?</p>
<p>The <em>kothi </em>is understood both as synonymous with <em>hijra</em> and as an attribute of hijraness. The <em>kothi</em> is also the <em>hijra</em> prior to nirvan, the castration experienced as generative of hijraness. That is to say that kothiness is what makes intelligible a <em>hijra</em> where kothiness would be that very set of acts that is often characterised by, to quote Serena Nanda, “adopting feminine mannerisms, taking on women’s names and using female kinship terms and a special, feminised vocabulary…they use coarse and abusive speech and gestures in opposition to the Hindu ideal of demure and restrained femininity”. Kothiness is in many ways all this and more but the kothi is defined for us today solely through the optics of penetration.</p>
<p>The <em>kothi</em> as identity is today strengthened and discursively constituted by the strategies of the HIV/AIDS industry and various NGOs. If we are to trace movements in HIV/AIDS discourses on same-sex attraction we will find a replication of the very same models we set out earlier. Initial interventions in this regard like those of the ABVA and Humsafar trust saw ‘gayness’ as a possible identity through which HIV strategies in this regard could form. An invocation of visibility versus invisibility was stressed which pushed forth the idea that the homosexual as population that was presently under a false consciousness will first have to group themselves under the identity ‘gay’ from where a protracted politics of position will enable the end of oppression on the basis of sexuality in particular through a relationship with HIV/AIDs much like it happened in the west through groups such as ACT-UP. It was also supposed that these identities based on sexual orientation could, now empowered, decide that they are not gay but some ‘x’ identity where ‘x’ becomes a culturally translatable, and indeed culturally intelligible, term for gayness.</p>
<p>Another position that was rhetorically differentiated from this orientation/identity model was another model of HIV strategic framing of India as a truly ‘queer’ space where the western categorisation of identities based on sexual orientation do not and indeed cannot exist (exemplified in the writings and statements of Shivananda Khan of Naz Foundation International.) This framework in denouncing sexual orientation as a culturally intelligible characteristic posits gender identity as the organising principle of male to male sexual encounters in India. The <em>kothi</em>, the <em>panthi</em> and the <em>dupli</em> are then pointed out as proof of this theory by a process of defining these categories. The <em>kothi</em> becomes the woman identified performer of femininity who takes on the passive penetrated role in sex and who only desires the <em>panthi</em>, the active non-feminine male identified. The <em>dupli</em> is then presumably within such a logic placed as someone who desires both the active and passive roles like the bisexual self who is characterised through an essential desire for both orientations/sexes.</p>
<p>It becomes clear that both these seemingly diverse positions are engaged in the discursive construction of a specific notion of sexualities as object choice positions where the object of desire is framed within the sameness/difference, male/female model and as identity.</p>
<p>What these moves do not explain is why these identities take their particular forms of expression here. Instead what we have is only an enumeration of new categories with the discovery of newer non-heterosexual practices.</p>
<h2>Critically Queer</h2>
<p>The post 1990s saw the emergence of the critically queer which at its most rigorous was theorised as a breaking out of heterosexual iterations of power. At its heart was the Foucauldian historicising of sexuality as an accumulating domain in the West beginning from the Roman period to the Western modern. We suggest that a similar accretion of the social domain into the domain of sexuality never takes place here and what instead accumulates is a mode of separating same-sex sociality into sexual and non-sexual domains with the scope of regulation restricting itself to this separation as opposed to the repression hypothesis that Foucault proffers for the West, which is not only to say that a range of sexual practices are performative to the extent that they mark out for themselves a separate domain of sociality for the sexual but also that identity has little or no part to play in this performative.</p>
<p>Let us look at two particular instances in everyday LGBT sociality to highlight this separation of domains.</p>
<p>Many of the male support groups that were set up in the formative years of what is being referred to as the LGBT movement in India emerge from public or privately created sexual spaces and over the years has seen an active regulation of this space to keep out the sexual. This mode of being is even evidenced online when a new member to an online forum set up for LGBT people expresses a sexual desire. Other members of the group almost immediately ask him to refrain from expressing his sexual desires in this space and suggest instead a networking site like ‘Planet Romeo’ for “such activities”. The last decade also saw the rise of parties, aimed at increasing visibility, that are organised for gay identified men in Mumbai, Bangalore or Delhi that often follow a strict <strong>no drag no sex rule</strong> which also includes self-policing of all toilets. So we have men dressed within clearly regulated notions of how men should dress who are dancing, whereas even two decades ago stories of parties organised similarly did not have these rules. The Bangalore <em>karaga</em> for instance allows for not just cross-dressing but also same-sex sexual encounters and that too in public spaces as opposed to the private spaces where entry is regulated. There are of course differences between the two but the point is that we are increasingly expected to accept as natural and necessary for the greater common gayhood these limits that we impose on ourselves and our actions.</p>
<p>This frame of marking out a separation between sexual and non-sexual sociality might better explain the various levels of incomprehension exhibited in the recent case of professor Ramchandra Srinivas Siras. Professor Srinivas Ramchandra Siras of the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) was found dead just days after the Allahabad High Court ordered his reinstatement to his position as reader and chairman of the department of Modern Indian languages from which he had been summarily dismissed by AMU authorities on the basis of misconduct. The misconduct in question being Siras’s perfectly legal act of having consensual sex with another adult man within the privacy of his allotted living quarters on campus. The legal act was shot on tape by three sting-crazed citizen-journalists who violently broke into his house, followed by the AMU proctor, deputy proctor, media advisor and public relations officer. AMU’s decision to suspend Siras came significantly seven months after the Delhi High Court legalized consensual homosexual sex. Most accounts of LGBT activism relate this narrative as one of homophobia, despite the fact that a fact finding team of sexuality activists note that almost everyone they spoke to in the university knew that Professor Siras was sexually attracted to men for the last 22 years that he has taught there or for that matter that the university has also thrown out lecturers who chose to break any similar sexual code like marrying outside of their religion.</p>
<p>One would be hard-pressed to find a similar narrative in the West. One can argue that AMU authorities acted with a moral outrage only in relation to the tape that suddenly threatened the sanctity of this marked space of Siras’ private sexual act that had through its capture in public technology threatened to enter the non-sexual realm. If we are able to look at this event through the lens suggested then we have a better explanation for the long-term acknowledgement of Siras’s sexual practices and the ways in which any transgression of this space (here forcibly induced by the violent intrusion into Siras’s room and the recording of acts marked out constantly as sexual. A condemning of the violence of intrusion into Siras’s home, while being both important and necessary, does not in any way address the rigidity of the marking out of sexual and non-sexual fields. A demand for privacy in this context, as is seen in the instance of legal activism against and shift effected in section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, we suggest, operates in keeping these two fields distinct and does not challenge, in any way, the separation of the two domains. It is precisely in this transgression of fields that we wish to locate the project of the critically queer and the question of the technological.</p>
<p><strong>Gender and Sexuality: A note</strong>: <em>We want to flag here that while we agree that gender is a domain available for understanding social practice and identity its link to sexuality is not implicit. We will take this up at length in future. </em></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/queer-histories-of-the-internet/sexuality-queerness-and-internet-technologies-in-indian-context'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/queer-histories-of-the-internet/sexuality-queerness-and-internet-technologies-in-indian-context</a>
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No publisherNithin ManayathCybercultures2019-09-18T14:08:52ZBlog Entry