The Centre for Internet and Society
http://editors.cis-india.org
These are the search results for the query, showing results 11 to 23.
Survey : Digital Natives with a cause?
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/survey-digital-natives-with-a-cause
<b>This survey seeks to consolidate information about how young people who have grown up with networked technologies use and experience online platforms and tools. It is also one of the first steps we have taken to interact with Digital Natives from around the world — especially in emerging information societies — to learn, understand and explore the possibilities of change via technology that lie before the Digital Natives. The findings from the survey will be presented at a multi-stakeholder conference later this year in The Netherlands.
</b>
<p>The Centre for Internet and Society, in collaboration with Hivos' Knowledge Programme, launched the "Digital Natives with a Cause?" Programme in 2008. After the initial study (<a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/publications/cis/nishant/dnrep.pdf/view" class="external-link">click here for a free download</a>), we are now gathering responses from young users of technology to help us understand, document and support different practices aimed at social transformation and political participation more efficiently.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>We believe that the world is changing very fast and that the rise of Internet technologies has a lot to do with it. As young users of technology (as opposed to young users who use technology) adopt, adapt and use these new technologised tools to interact with their environment, new ways of effecting change emerge. This survey is an attempt to capture some of the information which gives us an insight into who the people are, using these technologies, the ways in which they use them and what their perceptions and experiences are.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The survey will not take more than 7 minutes of your time but it will help us get a better sense of the way things are.</p>
<p> </p>
<strong>Please click here so start the
<a href="http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dG9reUVvQ0w4d1ZER3lKOUtFanZMUnc6MA" target="_blank"> survey</a>.</strong>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/survey-digital-natives-with-a-cause'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/survey-digital-natives-with-a-cause</a>
</p>
No publisherpushpaSocial mediaDigital NativesYouthFeaturedDigital subjectivitiesSocial Networking2011-08-04T10:35:43ZBlog EntryDigital Natives at Republica 2010
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnrepub
<b>Nishant Shah from the Centre for Internet and Society, made a presentation at the Re:Publica 2010, in Berlin, about its collaborative project (with Hivos, Netherlands) "Digital Natives with a Cause?" The video for the presentation, along with an extensive abstract is now available here.</b>
<p align="center"><object height="364" width="445"><param name="movie" value="about:blank"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed height="364" width="445" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Cz4KoL3jzi0&hl=en_GB&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6&border=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object></p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Abstract:</strong></p>
<p>As a growing population in
emerging Information Societies, particularly in Asia, experience a
lifestyle mediated by digital technologies, there is also a correlated
concern about the young digital natives constructing their identities
and expressions through a world of incessant consumption, while
remaining apathetic to the immediate political and social needs of
their times. Governments, educators, civil society theorists and
practitioners, have all expressed alarm at how the digital natives
across the globe are so entrenched in practices of incessant
consumption that they have a disconnect with the larger external
reality and contained within digital deliriums.<img title="Weiterlesen..." src="http://re-publica.de/10/wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/wordpress/img/trans.gif" alt="" /> They discard the emergent communication and expression trends,
mobilisation and participation platforms, and processes of cultural
production as trivial or unimportant. Such a perspective is embedded in
a non-changing view of the political landscape and do not take into
account that the Digital Natives are engaging in practices which might
not necessarily subscribe to the earlier notions of political
revolution, but offer possibilities for great social transformation and
participation.</p>
<p>The oldest Digital Native in the world – if popular definitions of
Digital Natives are accepted – turned 30 this year, whereas the youngest
is not yet born. In the last three decades, a population has been
growing up born in technologies, and mediated their sense of self and
their interactions with external reality through digital and internet
technologies. These interactions lead to significant transitions in the
landscape of the social and political movements as the Digital Natives
engage and innovate with new technologies to respond to crises in their
local and immediate environments. However, more often than not, these
experiments remain invisible to the mainstream discourses. The
mechanics, aesthetics and manifestation of these localised and
contextual practices hold the potentials for social transformation and
political participation for the future. This presentation looks at three
different case studies to look at how, through processes and
productions which have largely been neglected as self indulgent or
frivolous, Digital Natives around the world are actively participating
in the politics of their times, and also changing the way in which we
understand the political processes of mobilisation, participation and
transformation.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnrepub'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnrepub</a>
</p>
No publishernishantConferenceDigital ActivismDigital NativesCyberculturesDigital subjectivitiesResearchers at Work2015-05-15T11:35:48ZBlog EntryFill The Gap: Global Discussion on Digital Natives
http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/digital-natives-with-a-cause/dntweet
<b>More often than not people don't understand the new practices inspired by Internet and digital technologies. As such a series of accusations have been leveled against the Digital Natives. Educators, policy makers, scholars, and parents have all raised their worries without hearing out from the people they are concerned about. Hivos has initiated an online global discussion about Digital Natives. So, to voice your opinion, start tweeting with us now #DigitalNatives.</b>
<div class="content-view-full">
<div class="class-event">
<div class="pagecontent">
<h2>If you cannot attend Fill The Gap, you can also join us in a global discussion on some of the issues being discussed at #DigitalNatives<br /></h2>
<br />
<p>1.
Are
you an apolitical consumer, or do you have ambitions?</p>
<p><a href="http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNatives" target="_blank">http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNatives</a></p>
<p>2.
Are
you a little prince or princess, who only wants to talk to like minded people
or are you different?</p>
<p><a href="http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNativesPrincess" target="_blank">http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNativesPrincess</a></p>
<p>3.
Is
Wikipedia your bible or do you really know something?</p>
<p><a href="http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNativesWiki" target="_blank">http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNativesWiki</a></p>
<p>4.
Are
you a digital dinosaur? They say you don’t know anything about ICT!</p>
<p><a href="http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalDinosaur" target="_blank">http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalDinosaur</a></p>
<p>5.
Why
use the Internet, why don’t you march the streets?</p>
<p><a href="http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNativesProtest" target="_blank">http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNativesProtest</a></p>
<p>6.
Plans
to change the world? What do you need?</p>
<p><a href="http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNativesChanceTheWorld" target="_blank">http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNativesChanceTheWorld</a></p>
<br />If you are in Amsterdam, here is the information you will need to attend the event:<br />
<h2>Fill the Gap! - 7</h2>
<h3>
R U Online?</h3>
<div class="date">Date: 15 January 2010 </div>
<div class="date">Time: 12.30 until
17.00 hour</div>
<div class="date">Location: Het Sieraad, Postjesweg 1, Amsterdam</div>
<br />
<strong></strong>The seventh edition of Fill the Gap! is all about the power of youth
and IT in developing countries. How can their skills be strengthened
and put to use for a better world? Hivos, apart from cohosting the
event, will be involving digital natives to hear their stories about
ICT and engagement.
<br />
<p>
An Open Space event on the potential of new (mobile) media and youth in
developing countries. For everyone in politics, the profit and the
non-profit sectors who is interested in ICT and international
development cooperation.</p>
<p>
The use of new (mobile) technology is the most natural thing in the world for the youth of today.</p>
<p>
Shaped by the digital era and at ease with creativeity, these
innovators use new media to change the world. Just think of the Twitter
revolution in Iran. What can the international development sector learn
from this? How could international development cooperation use the
potential power of youth to tackle development problems?</p>
<p> The seventh edition of Fill the Gap! is all about the power of
youth and IT in developing countries. How can their skills be
strengthened and put to use for a better world? The kick-off will be
hosted by Jennifer Corriero, co-founder of Taking IT Global: the
international platform for youth and the use of new media for a better
world. Then the floor is open to discuss your own ideas with people
from new media, the business world and the international development
sector during the Open Space sessions. Join in: come to Amsterdam on
Friday January 15th and be inspired during Fill the Gap!<br />
<br /> Registration is free. The programme is in English.</p>
<br /><a href="http://www.fill-the-gap.nl/Fill_the_gap_7?" target="_blank">» Fill the Gap</a></div>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/digital-natives-with-a-cause/dntweet'>http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/digital-natives-with-a-cause/dntweet</a>
</p>
No publishernishantSocial mediaDigital ActivismDigital GovernanceDigital NativesAgencyYouthFeaturedCyberculturesNew PedagogiesDigital subjectivitiesICT2010-01-22T10:54:13ZBlog EntryA provisional definition for the Cultural Last Mile
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/definiton
<b>In the first of his entries, Ashish Rajadhyaksha gives his own spin on the 'Last Mile' problem that has been at the crux of all public technologies. Shifting the terms of debate away from broadcast problems of distance and access, he re-purposes the 'last mile' which is a communications problem, to make a cultural argument about the role and imagination of technology in India, and the specific ways in which this problem features in talking about Internet Technologies in contemporary India.</b>
<div class="main">
<div class="snap_preview">
<p>In its classical
form, the ‘last mile’ is a communications term defining the final stage
of providing connectivity from a communications provider to a customer,
and has been used as such most commonly by telecommunications and cable
television industries. There has however been a a specific Indian
variant, seen in its most classical avatar in scientist Vikram
Sarabhai’s contention that overcoming the last mile could solve the two
major challenges India has faced, of <strong>linguistic diversity </strong>and <strong>geographical distance</strong>,
and mounted as the primary argument for terrestrial television in the
early 1980s. (I will try and attach the Sarabhai paper a little later
to this posting).</p>
<p>This specifically Indian variation, where technology was mapped onto
developmentalist-democratic priorities, has been the dominant
characteristic of communications technology since at least the
invention of the radio in the 1940s. For at least 50 years now, that
means, the last mile has become a mode of a techno-democracy, where
connectivity has been directly translated into democratic citizenship.
It has continuously provided the major rationale for successive
technological developments, from the 1960s wave of portable
transistors, the terrestrial transponders of the first televisual
revolution it the early 1980s (the Special Plan for the Expansion of
Television), the capacity of satellite since SITE and the INSAT series,
and from the 1990s the arrival of wired networks (LANs, Cable,
fibre-optic) followed by wireless (WLAN, WiMAX, W-CDMA). At each point
the assumption has been consistently made that the final frontier was
just around the corner; that the next technology in the chain would
breach a major barrier, once and for all.</p>
<p><strong>What I hope to do is to provide a historical account to
argue that the theory of the ‘last mile’ has been founded on
fundamental (mis)apprehensions around just what this bridge
constitutes. </strong>Further, that these apprehensions may have been
derived from a misconstruction of democractic theory, to assume, first,
an evolutionary rather than distributive model for connectivity, and
second, to introduce a major bias for broadcast (or one-to-many) modes
as against many-to-many peer-to-peer formats. The book, whenever I
succeed in writing it, will hope to argue the following:</p>
<p>1. It has been difficult to include <strong>human resource</strong>
as an integral component to the last mile. Contrary to the relentlessly
technologized definition of the last mile, it may perhaps be best seen
historically as <em>also</em>, and even perhaps <em>primarily</em>, a
human resource issue. This is not a new realization, but it is one that
keeps reproducing itself with every new technological generation<a href="http://culturallastmile.wordpress.com/#_ftn1">[1]</a>,
with ever newer difficulties. The endemic assumption, derived from the
broadcasting origins of the definition is that it is primarily the <em>sender</em>’s responsibility to bridge the divide, that <em>technology </em>can
aid him to do so on its own, and that such technology can negate the
need to define connectivity as a multiple-way partnership as it reduces
the recipient into no more than an intelligent recipient of what is
sent (the citizen model). On the other hand, it is possible to show how
previous successful experiments bridging the last mile have been ones
where <em>recipients have been successfully integrated into the communications model </em>both as peers and, even more significantly, as <em>originators </em>as well as <em>enhancers </em>of
data. Importantly, this paper will show, this has been evidenced even
in one-way ‘broadcast’ modes such as film, television and radio (in the
movie fan, community radio and the television citizen-journalist).</p>
<p>2. The one-way broadcast versus peer-to-peer versus two/multiple-way
debate needs to he historically revisited. The need to redefine the
beneficiary of a connectivity cycle as a full-fledged partner tends to
come up against a bias written into standard communications models –
and therefore several standard revenue models – that consistently tend
to underplay what this paper will call the <em>significant sender/recipient</em>.
While both terrestrial and satellite systems require some level of
peer-to-peer transmission systems to facilitate last-mile
communications, it has been a common problem that unless <em>either</em> a clear focus exists on geographic areas <em>or</em>
significant peer-to-peer participation exists, broadcast models
inevitably find themselves delivering large amounts of S/N at low
frequencies without sufficient spectrum to support large information
capacity. While it is technically possible to ‘flood’ a region in
broadcasting terms, this inevitably leads to extremely high wastage as
much of the radiated ICE never reaches any user at all. As information
requirements increase, broadcast ‘wireless mesh’ systems small enough
to provide adequate information distribution to and from a relatively
small number of local users, require a prohibitively large number of
broadcast locations along with a large amount of excess capacity to
make up for the wasted energy.</p>
<p>This problem, importantly, springs as much from a built-in <em>ideological </em>commitment
to one-way broadcasting formats, as from technological limitations. The
technology itself poses further problems given the bias of different
systems to different kinds of connectivity, and with it different types
of peer-to-peer possibilities. Rather than attempting a
one-size-fits-all model for all models to follow, we need to work out
different <em>synergies </em>between broadcast-dependent and peer-to-peer-enabled platforms.</p>
<p>This book will eventually hope to study the history of peer-to-peer
and multiple-way structures as systems where sending has become a
component part of receiving. Key technological precedents to the
present definition of the sender-communication ‘partner’ would be <strong>community radio</strong>, <strong>low-power transmission-reception systems </strong>(most famously the Pij experiment in Gujarat conducted by ISRO), and various <strong>internet-based networking models</strong>.</p>
<p>3. The need to revisit the technological community is therefore
critical. The key question is one of how technological communities have
been produced, and how they may be sustained. In January 2007, the
attack by V.S. Ailawadi, former Chairman, Haryana Electricty Regulatory
Commission, on India’s public sector telecom giants BSNL and MTNL for
keeping their ‘huge infrastructure’ of ‘copper wire and optic fibre’ to
themselves, when these could be used by private operators as cheaper
alternatives to WiMAX, W-CDMA and broadband over power lines, shows the
uneasy relationship between new players and state agencies. Mr.
Ailawadi’s contention that the ‘unbundling’ of the last mile would
bring in competition for various types of wireless applications and
broadband services not just for 45 million landlines but also for 135
million mobile users of various service providers, also therefore needs
to be revisited from the perspective of community formation. How would
the new 135 million mobile users be effectively tapped for their
capacity to become what we are calling significant senders?</p>
<p>In defining the last mile as to do with the recipient-as-sender, and thus the <strong>community</strong>, this paper will focus on a history of community action along specific models of connectivity. These are: cinema’s <strong>movie fan</strong>, internet’s <strong>blogger</strong> and <strong>networker</strong>, solar energy’s <strong>barefoot engineer</strong>, software’s <strong>media pusher</strong> and television’s <strong>citizen-journalist. </strong>A specific focus for study will be the models of <strong>participatory learning</strong> in the classroom, using <strong>film</strong>, the <strong>vinyl disc</strong>, the <strong>audio cassette</strong>, the <strong>radio</strong>, the <strong>television</strong>, the <strong>web </strong>and now the <strong>mobile phone</strong>.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/definiton'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/definiton</a>
</p>
No publishernishantA copy of this post is also available on the author's personal blog at http://culturallastmile.wordpress.com/2009/10/25/1-what-is-the-cultural-last-mile/ICT4DDigital GovernancePublic AccountabilityInternet GovernanceCyberculturesDigital subjectivities2011-08-02T08:57:07ZBlog EntryPrivacy, pornography, sexuality (a video)
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/privacy-pornography-sexuality-a-video
<b>The video is an attempt to use the material collected for purposes of provoking a discussion around privacy, pornography, sexuality and technology. It focuses largely on an Indian context, which most viewers would be familiar with. The video is pegged around the ban of Savita Bhabhi – a pornographic comic toon – but uses that to open up a discussion on various incidents and concepts in relation to pornography and privacy across Asia.</b>
<p>
</p>
<p> <object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/iku2SafHlMs&hl=en_GB&fs=1&rel=0"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed height="344" width="425" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/iku2SafHlMs&hl=en_GB&fs=1&rel=0"></embed></object></p>
<p align="right"><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/RXKN_2Hbu1I&hl=en_GB&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed height="344" width="425" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/RXKN_2Hbu1I&hl=en_GB&fs=1&"></embed></object></p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> The project on pleasure and pornography will generate
outputs in different formats, but especially since it is meant to be
interdisciplinary (legal, critical, feminist, cybercultures, media and cinema
studies) it would be interesting to use different ways of communicating the
ideas that the project will develop. Several interviews have been conducted
(ranging from length of 30 mins to 2 hours) with contemporaries in India whose
work in different ways (quantitative research, historical research, filmmaking,
academic writings) intersects and relates to pornography – this includes Bharat
Murthy, Manjima Bhattacharjya, Nishant Shah, Ratheesh Radhakrishnan, Shohini
Ghosh and others.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The video above is an attempt to use the material collected
for purposes of provoking a discussion around privacy, pornography, sexuality
and technology. It focuses largely on an Indian context, which most viewers
would be familiar with. The video is pegged around the ban of Savita Bhabhi – a
pornographic comic toon – but uses that to open up a discussion on various
incidents and concepts in relation to pornography and privacy across Asia. For
instance what is the role of technology and how has it altered or not altered
relations between the citizen and the State, what are the stakes of the State
in sexual subjectivity of the citizens and what are the relations of gender,
pornography and debates around privacy in public discourse.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>In this post I would gesture towards the last category that
has not been touched upon earlier, in relation to countries such as Malaysia
and Indonesia. It has become important during the course of this project to
draw connections to work done in the global South. In legal studies, comparative
work around legal concepts of obscenity, pornography, vulgarity are most often
only in relation to America and United Kingdom, either for a strong tradition
of free speech and expression in both countries and because of historical
connections to common and legislative law in UK. However it is important to
examine the trajectories of similar legal paradigms (Malaysia) and even
different legal paradigms (Indonesia)
across Asia to understand the mechanics of how pornography is constructed and
understood in legal and possibly cultural terms as well. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Here we look at instances of material that are described as
pornography in legal terms and how that legal category avoids taking onto
itself what could be described as hard core pornography, and instead focuses on
material that in the Indian context are described as obscene (see <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/the-blindfolded-gaze-of-the-law-and-pornography" class="external-link">first blog post</a> on Indian law). In other parts of Asia, very often laws
that describe what is pornography play an important role in controlling women
and reinforcing gendered modes of access to media, information or to public
spaces. <br /></p>
<p><br /> </p>
<p>The Indonesian Anti-pornography law instead of protecting
the privacy of individuals, regulates and controls the ways in which women can
participate in the public sphere. The law deals with appropriate garb, behaviour,
forms of artistic and video practices under the broad umbrella of the term <em>pornoaksi</em> or pornographic action. In Indonesia as in other
parts of Asia, there has been over the last 4-5 years a flood of mobile and
webcam pornography uploaded by people themselves (couples and individuals),
which forms a large part of the erotic consumption in the country. The sheer
volume and circulation of these videos points to how technology is enmeshed in
sexual practices in even in the global South, contrary to what is written about
sexuality and technology that largely focuses on the phenomenon of
technology-sexuality in the global North around platforms such as Second Life<a name="_ednref1" href="#_edn1"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[i]</span></a>
or aspects of virtual reality. However the new law (passed in 2008) does not address this phenomenon directly even though that was the reason for promulgation of the law, but instead focuses of the dubious and vague category of pornoaksi.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The law also allows for ordinary citizens to complain about obscene behaviour. According to gender and human rights activists in Indonesia, this gives a lot of leeway to the more socially conservative elements to complain and even attack film festivals, gatherings etc. In an article (unpublished) about the anti pornography law, Julia Suryakusuma (a columnist and writer in Indonesia) says -</p>
<p>
"But is the so-called ‘Anti-Pornography Law’ indeed aimed
against ‘pornography’, or is really directed against women and the freedoms won
through post-Soeharto democratization? The Law, I will argue, is, in fact,
based on a social construction of ‘morality’ and womanhood that masks as
religion but which is, in fact, a potent combination of social conservatism and
political opportunism."</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The video ends with a very moving press conference
by the Malaysian State Assemblywoman offering her resignation because intimate
(but not pornographic) pictures of her had been circulated without her consent
by her ex-boyfriend. The incident was a transparent ploy by an opposing
political party to denounce a formidable opponent and attempts to use public
discourse around obscenity, vulgarity to limit the politician’s participation
in the public sphere.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The video was also part of a discussion around privacy,
agency and security organized at the recent Internet Governance Forum in Egypt
in November, 2009<a name="_ednref2" href="#_edn2"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[ii]</span></a> and was
screened at the beginning of the workshop to spear head a discussion between
varied participants. The workshop was organized by Alternative Law Forum, Association for Progressive Communication - Women's Networking Support Programme and Center for Internet and Society. The IGF saw an intense focus on issues of privacy
especially in relation to issues of data aggregation and control over private
and public data of individuals by corporate entities. The video and the session
was an attempt to bring into the focus of such discussions, issues more
pertinent from a feminist, queer or theoretical perspective.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<div><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="edn1">
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn1" href="#_ednref1"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[i]</span></a> Coming of
age in Second Life, Tom Boellstorff : An ethnography of Second Life that looks
at various aspects of practices online including friendship, sexuality,
marriage, aspirations and desires.</p>
</div>
<div id="edn2">
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn2" href="#_ednref2"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[ii]</span></a> More
details of this workshop (concept note, speakers) are available on the IGF
website at <a href="http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/index.php/component/chronocontact/?chronoformname=WSProposals2009View&wspid=275">http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/index.php/component/chronocontact/?chronoformname=WSProposals2009View&wspid=275</a></p>
</div>
</div>
<p>
</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/privacy-pornography-sexuality-a-video'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/privacy-pornography-sexuality-a-video</a>
</p>
No publishernamitaDigital subjectivitieswomen and internetCensorshipObscenity2011-08-02T08:37:19ZBlog EntryDigital Natives with a Cause?
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnrep
<b>Digital Natives With A Cause? - a product of the Hivos-CIS collaboration charts the scholarship and practice of youth and technology with a specific attention for developing countries to create a framework that consolidates existing paradigms and informs further research and intervention within diverse contexts and cultures.</b>
<p></p>
<p><img class="image-left" src="../dnr/image_preview" alt="Digital Natives Report" /><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/" class="external-link">The Centre for Internet and Society</a>, Bangalore and <a class="external-link" href="http://http://www.hivos.net/">Hivos</a> have assessed
the state of knowledge on the potential impact of youth for social
transformation and political engagement in the South. This report ‘<em>Digital Natives with a Cause?’</em>
charts the scholarship and practice of youth and technology and informs
further research and intervention within diverse contexts and cultures.</p>
<p>
The report displays that digital natives have a potential impact as
agents of change. It concludes that multidisciplinary theoretical
approaches venturing beyond the cause-and-effect model and providing
the necessary vocabulary and sensitivity are crucial to understanding
Digital Natives. The lament that youths are apolitical is a result of
insufficient attention to activities that do not conform to existing
notions of political and civil society formation. Digital Natives are
sensitive and thoughtful. It is time to listen to them and their ideas,
and to focus on their development as responsible and active citizens
rather than on their digital exploits or technologised interests.</p>
<p>The report specifically focuses on youth as e-agents of change within emerging information societies to explore questions of technology mediated identities, embedded conditions of social transformation and political participation, as well as potentials for sustained livelihood and education. It identifies the knowledge gaps and networks and further areas of intervention in the field of Digital Natives.</p>
<p>As a first step in working towards enabling Digital Natives for
social transformation and political engagement, Hivos and CIS will
organize a Multistakeholder Conference Fall 2010.</p>
<p>A summary of the report, as well as the detailed narrative are now available for discussion, debate, suggestions and ideas.</p>
<p class="Inleiding"> </p>
<p class="Inleiding">Digital Natives with a Cause? - Report Download Pdf document <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/uploads/dnrep1" class="internal-link" title="Digital Natives with a Cause? - Report">Here</a></p>
<p class="Inleiding">Digital Natives with a Cause? - Report Summary Download Pdf document<a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/uploads/dnsum" class="internal-link" title="Digital Natives with a Cause? - Summary of Report"> Here</a></p>
<p class="Inleiding"> </p>
<p class="Inleiding">The report is also available at <a class="external-link" href="http://http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause/News/New-Publication-on-Digital-Natives">http://http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause/News/New-Publication-on-Digital-Natives</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnrep'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnrep</a>
</p>
No publishernishantRAW PublicationsDigital NativesWeb PoliticsFeaturedBooksDigital subjectivitiesResearchers at Work2015-05-15T11:31:14ZBlog EntryIT and the cITy
http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/itcity
<b>Nishant Shah tells ten stories of relationship between Internet Technologies and the City, drawing from his experiences of seven months in Shanghai. In this introduction to the city, he charts out first experiences of the physical spaces of Shanghai and how they reflect the IT ambitions and imaginations of the city. He takes us through the dizzying spaces of Shanghai to see how the architecture and the buildings of the city do not only house the ICT infrastructure but also embody it in their unfolding. In drawing the seductive nature of embodied technology in the physical experience of Shanghai, he also points out why certain questions about the rise of internet technologies and the reconfiguration of the Shanghai-Pudong area have never been asked. In this first post, he explains his methdologies that inform the framework which will produce the ten stories of technology and Shanghai, and how this new IT City, delivers its promise of invisibility.</b>
<p></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Shanghai. City of bits, bytes and
Baozi. China’s home-grown success story that eclipses the colonial legends of
HongKong. The city that was, until the Bejing Olympics, the showcase city which
is now working hard at recovering some of its stolen glory as it prepares for
the World Trade Expo in 2010. A city that is constantly at war with itself,
trying to museumise its past, eradicate pockets of history and times, and
running to escape its present and live in a futuristic tomorrow. A city that
broke the distinctions of the public and the private, by privatising all that
was public, and by encouraging the private to be constructed for a public
spectacle. There are many stories of Shanghai to be told, but the one that
needs to be told now, is about the space of the city and how, in its attempt to
become an IT city, it has become a city of surfaces, all reminding you, in an
overwhelming hypervisual way that is the predominant aesthetic of cyberspaces,
that it is the city that not only houses technology but also embodies it,
becoming, possibly, the only city in Asia that brings the IT back into the
City.</p>
<img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/shanghai/image_preview" alt="Aerial view" class="image-left" title="Aerial view" />
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">A cursory glance around you,
perhaps travelling in the uber efficient metro system that feeds into the
mobile metaphor of accelerated speed and space that Shanghai has become, or
just walking down the more touristy XinTianDi where the rich and the famous of
Shanghai’s society hang out, or walking down the HuaiHai Road where
sky-scrapers fortress the sky and shopping malls greet you with neon-lit spaces
of consumption, you are overwhelmed at the significant and ubiquitous presence
of internet technologies. The buildings are designed to be interfaces, rather
than walls, covered constantly with the graffiti of digital advertisements,
live weather and stock updates, displaying the latest block-buster movie, or
just presenting a kaleidoscopic array of lights spiralling in a dizzying,
schizophrenic style on the surfaces of the buildings. As you walk through the
sci-fi inspired urban landscape, you try and suppress the feeling of being
inside a giant-size arcade game, waiting for a gobbling monster to come and
devour you, and continue browsing at the city that never remains the same –
either the surfaces mutate so that not even signboards or billboards remain the
same, or the very buildings disappear into rubble under the shadows of gigantic
cranes, as a concentrated demand for real estate necessitates a constant
recycling of limited space (The estimate says that 60 per cent of Shanghai gets
rebuilt every ten years), or high speed transport dissolves the city into a
blur so that only the biggest and the brightest buildings stay as north-stars
to the fluid geography of the city.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">If you happen to stand on the
magnificent Bund in PuXi (The older Shanghai), you keep on looking down at the
ground beneath your feet, making sure that it is still there, because the
slightly lurid but dazzling sky-line that faces you, with huge LCD screens
mounted on buildings, lights flirting with low lying clouds on the top of
gigantic buildings, and a constant buzz of electricity breaking the waves in
the Huangpu river, you know that you are in a city that gives IT its address.
No other city in Asia – not even the almost-not-Asia spaces of Tokyo or
Singapore – gives you the assurance of being completely and totally immersed in
the glory of Internet technologies. Shanghai stands, networked, connected,
mobile, accelerated, and in a time-less vacuum that hoovers the future into the
present, as a city that technology studies will have to reckon with in a
paradigm of its own.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Bund/image_preview" alt="Shanghai Bund" class="image-right" title="Shanghai Bund" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">And so strong is this seduction
of technology that conversations about technology and its place in Shanghai,
always revolves around the surface – about the building of the surface, about
the dissolution of depth (temporal or spatial),
and about imagining the city only in terms of light, connectivity, and
speed. So that the historicity in PuXi
becomes a flat display of the Chinese Way (Zhongguo Fangshi) and the
work-in-progress present in PuDong remains a quest for the future. In this split discourse, the questions and concerns - about governance, about citizenship, about regulation, about cultural production and political negotiation - become invisible. Like the buildings, which get guised in digital cloaks, the questions that pressingly need to be asked but are always postponed, also get cloaked in the rhetoric of development propelled by ICTs and globalisation. In a city that was constructed to eternally deflect attention, ownership or voices, how does one begin to scratch at the surfaces (Literally and figuratively) to search for something more than narratives of consumption, solipsist self-gratification, and self-congratulatory development?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">It is with this agenda, in this city, torn and
marked and seamlessly stitched by technology, that I start to unravel my
questions about Internet and Society in China, trying to look at relationships
between technologies, city spaces and identities, drawing from seven months spent
at the Centre for Contemporary Studies at the Shanghai University. These stories, written with retrospective memory and embellished by the privilege of
hindsight, posit a set of questions about Internet technologies, construction
of city spaces, and manifestation of identities in China, but especially in
Shanghai, to locate potentials of social transformation, political
participation, engagement and discourse, which has not been transplanted on
technology studies in China. In the process it also lays down a framework to
understand how, in an oppressive or authoritarian regime, the cultural becomes
the grounds upon which foundations of new political intervention and social
change can be built.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This blog, in its ten different
entries, relies on academic and popular discourse, semi-structured interviews,
participant observation, field work, conversations, and personal experiences that
I collected in my stay there, trying to deal with the double translations of
culture and language. Whenever I have been unsure – and those moments have been
many – I have tried to discuss and debate ideas with colleagues, friends, peers
and participants, to ensure that the observations or arguments are qualified by
more than just a neo-colonial meaning making sensibilities. Despite that rigour, if faults remain, they
are all mine, and hopefully will serve as points of entry into a fruitful
discourse.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/itcity'>http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/itcity</a>
</p>
No publishernishantCyberspaceinternet and societyShanghaiICT4DDigital NativesCyberculturesDigital subjectivitiesIT Cities2009-09-18T10:45:27ZBlog EntryChutnefying English - Report
http://editors.cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/hinglish
<b>The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, was an institutional partner to India's first Global Conference on Hinglish - Chutnefying English, organised by Dr. Rita Kothari at the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad. A photographic report for the event is now available here.</b>
<p></p>
<p>In January of 2009, Dr. Rita Kothari, at the Mudra Institute
of Communications, Ahmedabad, organised the first global conference called “<a class="external-link" href="http://conferences.mica-india.net/">Chutneyfying
English</a>”, calling in various stakeholders from different walks of life –
academics, scholars, researchers, actors, cultural producers, authors and
consumers to critically examine the growing phenomenon of Hinglish and how it
intersects with our globalised lives. The two day conference brought together a
series of presentations, ranging from academic papers to lively round table
discussions to panels that looked at the different manifestations of Hinglish
and the political and aesthetic potential of this particular form. Scholars
like <a class="external-link" href="http://www.mica-india.net/AcademicsandResearch/Profiles/Profiles%20new/Rita.htm">Rita Kothari</a>, Harish Trivedi, <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/people/staff/nishant-shah" class="internal-link" title="Nishant Shah">Nishant Shah</a>, Daya Thussu, Shanon Finch and
Rupert Snell were complemented by cultural producers like <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nandita_Das">Nandita Das</a>, R. Raj
Rao, and <a class="external-link" href="http://www.arts.auckland.ac.nz/staff/index.cfm?S=STAFF_skot005">Shuchi Kothari</a>. Literary stakeholders like <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urvashi_Butalia">Urvashi
Bhutalia</a>, <a class="external-link" href="http://pipl.com/directory/people/Bachi/Karkaria">Bachi Karkaria</a>, and Tej Bhatia rubbed shoulders with more mainstream
practitioners like Prasoon Joshi, <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahesh_Bhatt">Mahesh Bhatt</a> and Cyrus Broacha.</p>
<p>The Centre for Internet and Society was an<a class="external-link" href="http://conferences.mica-india.net/sponsors.html"> institutional
partner</a> for the event, and supported the panel on New Media, which saw four
paper presentations and a discussion moderated by Nishant Shah, Director
Research at the CIS. The panel explored diverse presentations from Mattangi
Krishnamurthy, Pramod Nair and Supriya Gokarn, who looked at the diverse ways
in which the rise of Internet and digital technologies is not only changing the
ways in which people express themselves, but they are also leading to complex
ways in which new conditions of identity, consumption and politics are
manifesting themselves. Nishant Shah responded to the panel by positing the
idea of Hinglish as a paradigm, rather than a set of characteristics, which
goes beyond the questions of language and actually resides in the aesthetic
conditions of the internet technologies.</p>
<p>A photographic documentation of the event with an
introduction by Dr. Rita Kothari, the chief organiser and curator for the
conference is now available for a free download <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/research/conferences/Hinglish/at_download/file" class="external-link">here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/hinglish'>http://editors.cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/hinglish</a>
</p>
No publishernishantConferenceArtCyberculturesCommunitiesDigital subjectivitiesDigital Pluralism2009-08-27T06:03:23ZBlog EntryPleasure and Pornography: Impassioned Objects
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/impassioned-objects-unraveling-the-history-of-fetish
<b>In this post, a third in the series documenting her CIS-RAW project, Pleasure and Pornography, Namita Malhotra explores the idea of fetish as examined by Anne McClintock (i) . This detour is an exploration of the notion of fetish, its histories and meanings, and how it might relate to the story of Indian porn. </b>
<p><br />The etymology of fetish derives from the word fetico (Portuguese) which means sorcery or magic arts. In 1760, it was used to refer to primitive religions, especially in relation to the growing project of imperialism. In 1867, Marx coined the term commodity fetishism – using the implied meaning of primitive magic to express the central social form of modern industrial economy, whereby the social relation between people metamorphoses into the relation between things. It was only after this, in 1905, that Freud transferred the word, with all these meanings still clinging to it, to the realm of sexuality and perversions. As Anne McClintock points out, in her useful account and re-understanding of the fetish in the book <em>Imperial Leather</em> (ii), psychoanalysis, philosophy, and Marxism all take shape around the invention of the primitive fetish, which conveniently displaces what the modern mind cannot accommodate onto the invented domain of the primitive. She states that the not-so-concealed rationale of imperialism is fetishism. Fetishists (racial, sexual and other) became a mode of warranting and justifying conquest and control -- whether it was the policing of sexual fetishism for control of classes in Europe and colonies, or the invention of racial fetishism central to the regime of imposing sexual surveillance in the colonies.<strong> The imperial discourse on fetishism became a discipline of containment</strong> (iii) .</p>
<p>On the other hand in the realm of sexuality, fetish becomes a question of male sexuality alone -- male perversion par excellence. There are no female fetishists, either for Freud or Lacan, for to speak of female fetishism would involve displacing the basic precepts of psychoanalysis -- namely the scene of castration leading to phallic fetishism. However, McClintock points to the usefulness of studying female fetishism, as it allows for certain things to happen. First, it dislodges the centrality of the phallus in this discourse, which surprisingly makes way for the presence and legitimacy of a multiplicity of pleasures, needs, and contradictions that can’t be resolved or reduced merely to the desire to preserve the phallus. Very often, feminists such as McClintock read the Lacanian insistence on the centrality of the phallus as itself a fetishistic nostalgia for a single, male myth of origins and fetishistic disavowal of difference. Such a notion of fetish, embedded in phallic theory, gets easily reduced to sexual difference and does not allow/admit race or class as crucially formative categories as well; thus, race and class remain continuously of secondary status in the primarily sexually signifying chain.</p>
<p>“The racist fetishizing of white skin, black fetishizing gold chains, the fetishizing of black dominatraces, lesbians, cross dressing as men the fetishizing of national flags, slave fetishism, class cross-dressing, fetishes such as nipple clips and bras in male transvestism, leather bondage, PVC fetishism, babyism and so on -- these myriad different deployments of fetishistic ambiguity cannot be categorized under a single mark of desire, without great loss of theoretical subtlety and historical complexity.” Also McClintock points to racist, nationalistic and patriotic fetishes -- such as flags, crowns, maps, swastikas (or for instance chaddis) -- that can’t be simply rendered equivalent to the disavowal of male castration anxiety. <br /><br />McClintock calls for a renewed investigation of fetishism -- to open it up to a more complex and valuable history in which racial and class hierarchies would play as formative a role as sexuality. Rejecting the Lacanian and Freudian fixation on the phallus as central to psychoanalysis would call for a mutually transforming investigation into the disavowed relations of psychoanalysis and social history. In a way, it would be the bringing together of the varied ways in which fetish has been used -- by Freud (in the domain of psychoanalysis) in the realm of domesticity and the private, and by Marx (in the domain of male socio-economic history) in the realm of the market and possibly in the public. If these meanings were to speak to each other, what we discover is that fetish is in fact the historical enactment of ambiguity itself.</p>
<p>Fetishism involves the displacement onto an object of contradictions that the individual cannot resolve at a personal level. These contradictions could indeed be social, though lived with profound intensity in the imagination and flesh of the person. The fetish -- rather than being a merely an insignificant sexual or personal practice -- inhabits both personal and historical memory. It marks a crisis in social meaning -- the embodiment of an impossible resolution. This crisis/contradiction is displaced onto and embodied in the fetish object, which is thus destined to recur in compulsive ways. By displacing this power onto the fetish, then manipulating or controlling the fetish, the individual gains symbolic control over what might otherwise be terrifying ambiguities.</p>
<p>The fetish then can be called an impassioned object; something that emerges from a variety of social contradictions, rather than merely from the scene of castration or phallic centric domains. Hence they are neither universal, nor are they entirely about personal histories alone, but are about personal and historical memory or a social contradiction that is experienced at an intensely personal level. “As composite symbolic objects, fetishes thus embody the traumatic coincidence not only of individual but also of historical memories held in contradiction” (McClintock). This reading of fetishism gives rise to far richer possibilities of cultural analysis.</p>
<p>Fetish was neither proper to African or Christian European culture, but sprang into being from an abrupt encounter between two heterogeneous worlds during an era of mercantile capitalism and slavery. At this point it clearly embodies the problem of contradictory social value -- whether it is gold as valuable, or gold as warding off bad luck. Though initially just about heathen customs and rituals, it later also becomes a marking of certain groups of people for conquest. It is from this context that Freud transports the word, laden with meanings of conquest and violence, to the realm of sexuality. Obviously these meanings stain future connotations of fetish, the word fetish itself becoming prey to contradictory meanings of race and sex and difference.</p>
<p>For Freud, the fetish is the embodiment in one object of two positions -- castration and its denial. Though this does capture some sense of the ambiguity that McClintock also refers to, here the meanings oscillate between two, and only two, fixed options (a recurring male economy). The fetish becomes both a permanent memorial to the horror of castration, embodied not in the male but in the female -- as well as a token of triumph, and safeguard against the threat of castration. This has, of course, been critiqued by feminists quite severely. McClintock’s basic argument is that it is indeed hard, considering the varied nature of fetish objects, to find a single originary explanation in the psychic development of the individual -- in a single originary trauma. What is important here, however is to take on this notion of the fetish as an historical enactment of ambiguity itself, and see if as a theoretical concept it has any value to the study of the loose category of Indian porn, especially MMS porn. <br /><br /><strong>Soap in these strange days: fetish objects</strong><br /><br /><em>“Such spectacle creates the promise of a rich sight: not the sight of particular fetishized objects, but sight itself as richness, as the grounds for extensive experience.”<br />Dana Polan (iv)</em><br /><br />Anne McClintock’s work on fetish also looks at the seemingly ubiquitous object of soap as the carrier of many ambiguous meanings around gender, class, imperialism -- both the cult of domesticity (the running of the empire of home with servants, sweepers, cleaners, women, maids etc.) and the cult of new imperialism found in soap in its exemplary mediating form. The story of soap, for McClintock, reveals that fetishism rather than a quintessentially African propensity (belonging in the realm of lands and peoples that were being discovered through imperialism) was in fact central to industrial modernity; fetishism was not original either to industrial capitalism or precolonial economies, but was from the outset the embodiment and record of an incongruous and violent encounter (between two or more heterogenous cultures) and about rapid changes of modernity, rather than about the ‘primitive’. <br /><br />Marx says that the mystique of the commodity fetish lies not in its use value, but in its exchange value and its potency as a sign: “So far as (a commodity) is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it”. This could be linked to the idea of a mobile phone that is supposed to achieve so much beyond mere communication, at least according to the advertising -- they should mend ruptured relations and homes, get all the hot chicks, grow beautiful gardens, change the boring routine of life. For some time, the Samsung mobile phone ad with Estella Warren played in India, which probably moves the mobile phone with camera out of merely its symbolic use as enhancing attractiveness, to actually ‘getting’ or rather capturing girls by clicking. Magically in the ad, the act of clicking photographs make the girl not just willing, but she also takes the phone and photographs herself. Barring one scary moment when it looks like she might turn into an avenging warrior like Xena or The Bride, but instead she simpers into a loving sexy pose, she is willing. The ad can’t be easily dismissed as misogynistic, but it does give an intriguing glimpse of the intimate pictures and moments that can be captured with a mobile phone. <br /><br />That a mobile phone is fetishized as a commodity is probably evident, from the rush to get the more enhanced phone with the better camera and features, though mobile phones are also a ubiquitous element of one’s life, in some ways exactly like soap. Probably in a country like India, having a mobile phone can be read as opening up sexual possibilities in a way that wouldn’t be obvious in a more developed country. If the fetish is a social contradiction that is experienced at an intensely personal level, then the mobile phone, especially after the DPS MMS clip, is precariously located between the zones of the private and personal, and that which is entirely in the public domain beyond any control of the person(s). This ability of the mobile phone to occupy simultaneous universes because of its interconnectedness in a network, and that it is (for most people now) an entirely personal object with messages, numbers, conversations, images, videos, is what makes it unpredictable. <br /><br /><strong>Looking at MMS porn</strong><br /><em>“Memories were meant to fade. They were built that way for a reason”<br />Mace, Strange Days</em><br /><br />When looking at MMS porn, I’m irresistibly reminded of the movie <em>Strange Days</em>, in which Angela Basset’s character Mace expresses her frustration with Lenny (played by Ralph Fiennes). Lenny is obsessed with preserving memory and accessing other people’s experiences, through what in the movie are called playbacks. Playbacks are recordings of events in the brain that were fed back into brain waves to reproduce the earlier event -- the feelings, the sensations of touch, the smells and not just the visual. Playbacks haven’t been invented yet, but the obsessiveness with which Lenny wheels and deals (he’s also a dealer and collector of playbacks) gives a peculiar insight into how mobile phones are becoming fetish objects of sorts -- particularly MMSs recorded on mobile phones where other people are able to occupy the space of an unknown character that conveniently rarely ever appears on the screen. The famous pornographic ones are the DPS MMS clip and other MMS scandals, including the hidden voyeuristic ones taken without permission, and a precursor of this is Mysore Mallige where the man appears rarely on the screen and only at the end, almost like a signature. In a peculiar way MMS porn becomes like playback from Strange Days, a movie that is attempting to unravel the unknown future mired in technological changes that are messily intertwined with human desire and frailty. A future (set on the date of turning the millennium) that we’ve hopelessly gone past without even asking many of the questions that the characters in the movie pose.<br /><br />Indian websites advertise MMS scandals as a specific category of pornography. This category also includes genuine MMS clips of celebrities kissing (Kareena Kapoor), wardrobe malfunctions from Fashion Week, and also fake ones with celebrity look-alikes bathing, changing, having sex (Preity Zinta, Mallika Sherawat). Mostly what is being talked about are videos made on mobile phones by men, who record themselves having sex with ‘gullible’ women. The alleged gullibility of these women is probably essential to the erotic charge of such videos. They are shaky videos, especially when sex is underway, and have a grainy quality that makes them eerily real. Their perspective is usually that of the man who is holding the phone camera and rarely enters the frame himself, whereas the woman is definitely the desirable object that is being captured. Maybe this phenomenon can be understood better if one looks at McClintock’s idea of fetish and whether MMS/images on mobile phones can be located within that category -- whether the ambiguous nature of the video or image recorded on the mobile phone and its ability to be an intensely personal and private object and also to be so easily transmitted into networks signifies a crisis in social meanings around private and public. The mobile phone then merely becomes an object onto which this anxiety is displaced, and the recording of images repeatedly (and anxieties and fears triggered when they accidentally slip into the public domain) are ways of trying to control terrifying ambiguities over the private and the public (where aspects of sexuality, family and selfhood could be calamitously disrupted by a slip between the two categories). (v)<br /><br />In a strange way this is a parable for a larger phenomenon of pornographic circulation and the law, as well. The mass circulation of pornography is perceived as a private secret that is kept by all, and whenever there is slip between the two categories, the law and public discourse are barely able to deal with the furore of anxieties. And if not, then the law and public discourse proceed to deal with the banal unbuttoning of Akshay Kumar’s jeans by his wife as obscenity in courtrooms, as if we hadn’t all imagined an MMS that allowed us to be doing the same. <br /><br /> i. Anne Mcclintok’s work on sadomasochism illuminates some of the arguments that I make in relation to sexual subjectivity and the state’s interests and desires in policing it. (unpublished article for book on queer issues and the law). Her work borrows from notions developed by Foucault. “Sadomasochism plays social power backwards, visibly and outrageously staging hierarchy, difference and power, the irrational, ecstasy or alienation of the body, placing these ideas at the centre of western reason.” The analysis of sexual subjectivity and State’s interest in it also looks at the judgment on sadomasochism by the House of Lords, England that declares such activities that cause severe injuries and maim the body, as illegal, regardless of consent of parties. <br />ii. Anne Mcclintok, Imperial Leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest, Routledge, 1995.<br />iii. Ibid<br />iv. Cited from Laura Mulvey, Some Thoughts on Theories of Fetishism in the Context of Contemporary Culture, October, Vol. 65 (Summer, 1993), pp. 3-20. </p>
<p>v. As in the story of Chanda in Dev.d loosely inspired from the DPS MMS clip incident<br /><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/uploads/kalkichanda.jpg/image_preview" alt="Chanda from Dev.d" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Chanda from Dev.d" /><br /><br /><br /></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/impassioned-objects-unraveling-the-history-of-fetish'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/impassioned-objects-unraveling-the-history-of-fetish</a>
</p>
No publishernamitahistories of internet in IndiaCyberspaceinternet and societyObscenitywomen and internetYouTubeCyborgsCyberculturesDigital subjectivities2011-08-02T08:35:20ZBlog EntryPleasure and Pornography: Pornography and the Blindfolded Gaze of the Law
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/the-blindfolded-gaze-of-the-law-and-pornography
<b>In the legal discourse, pornography as a category is absent, except as an aggravated form of obscenity. Does this missing descriptive category assist in the rampant circulation of pornography, either online or offline? Rather than ask that question, Namita Malhotra, in this second post documenting her CIS-RAW project, explores certain judgments that indeed deal with pornographic texts and uncovers the squeamishness that ensures that pornography as an object keeps disappearing before the law.
</b>
<p><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>When Justicia, blindfolded, cannot see the profane …</strong><br /><br />In the legal discourse, pornography as a category is absent, except as an aggravated form of obscenity (1). Does this missing descriptive category assist in the rampant circulation of pornography, either online or offline? Rather than ask that question, I would like to explore certain judgments that indeed deal with pornographic texts and uncover the squeamishness that ensures that pornography as an object keeps disappearing before the law.</p>
<p>For instance, in the case of Fatima Riswana V. Chennai & Ors. (2) both the public prosecutor and counsel for the petitioners applied to the court for transfer to another (male) judge, to save the District Lady Judge from embarrassment. The order for transfer was passed, so that the District Lady Judge does not have to view certain CDs that are part of the evidence. The justification for this is that the 'said trial would be about the exploitation of women and their use in sexual escapades by the accused, and the evidence in the case is in the form of CDs, viewing of which would be necessary in the course of the trial; therefore, for a woman Presiding Officer it would cause embarrassment'.</p>
<p>This is a rather obvious case, where explicit and pornographic material is made to disappear before the eyes of the law, gesturing towards the larger complicity that allows society and law to create a ruckus about Richard Gere and Shilpa Shetty’s kiss, HBO's English movie channel, dance bars and other such aspects of the sleazy modernity that we inhabit (3), but simultaneously is oblivious to circulation of pornography, both online and offline.</p>
<p>In a rather confrontational visual juxtaposition, I place Savita Bhabhi alongside Husain’s Mother India, to be able to ask several questions, including the question of which one’s existence has been more threatened by the law. There is almost no doubt about it; Savita Bhabhi’s chequered career as a slutty housewife has been marred only by two scandals (and several almost patriotic accounts of India having finally arrived (4)) – once when a child sent an MMS about his teacher and it made references to Savita Bhabi, which led to some mention of action that might be taken against the website (5), and another time when Karan Johar (Mid Day, Delhi – 31 March 2009) remarked that one of the characters, Jeet, has a look similar to that given to Amitabh Bachchan in 'Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna', and this might be a case of copyright infringement. Neither of these have resulted in any serious charge against the alleged anonymous producers, Indian Porn Empire, or what is more probable, the blocking of the website regardless of whether the producers/creators can be found and prosecuted. However Husain’s untitled painting, which surfaced on a website for an auction for victims of a Kashmir earthquake in 2006 (two years after it was first sold by the painter), was dragged to court on serious charges of obscenity, which fortunately led to a rather progressive judgment on obscenity by the Delhi High Court.</p>
<p>Returning to the two images of nude women, obscenity law in India has laid down that “nudity in art and literature is not per se evidence of obscenity”. As stated in the judgment that dealt with the circulation of Hussain’s untitled painting (later titled 'Bharat Mata') 'the work as a whole must be considered, the obscene matter must be considered by itself and separately to find out whether it is so gross and its obscenity so decided that it is likely to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to influences of this sort'. What renders an object obscene is the transaction rather than the text -- a transaction involving the depiction-consumption of the female body , and the sexualisation of the viewer who in turn sexualises the object. It is not just that the painting/image may already be sexualized but also that the public is in turn sexualised by looking at it (and sexualises it with its
gaze), thus making them vulnerable to the perversion that is modernity
itself and the pornographic gaze (Nitya Vasudevan and Namita A. Malhotra, State of Desire - Unpublished article). To put it simply, the anxiety of the state is not just about the object, but also about its circulation in the public, and the meanings it acquires through these series of transactions.</p>
<p>Legal and public discourse is often obsessed with the various meanings that become possible because of the placing of this naked body - or the transactions of this naked body with the context, background, narrative that it is placed in. Though seemingly sexualised already as a naked body (this can be refuted not only by the Indian court but various examples in art, religious architecture, etc.) the meanings it may carry are further complicated when it is placed in a pornographic comic online, bearing a crown and saying 'I will be Miss India', or as a faceless hazy outline in the foreground of the map of India. Hussain’s depiction of the naked woman on the map of India, embodying India (in pain or anger) carries many jostling, conflicting meanings. Inspite of the furore over the painting, the High Court finally held that the painting was not obscene, stating that the intention of the painter was to evoke sympathy for a woman – indeed a nation – in distress (6) . However what is intriguing, is that Savita Bhabi’s body, her markings of Indian-ness, her poses and postures are not examined to that extent either by the court or the public.</p>
<p>Pornography, as obscenity in its aggravated form or explicit depiction of sexual acts without a relevant or coherent narrative, has been dropped from both legal discourse and academic and cultural analysis--is it possible to surmise that this has happened because it can be read as a blank slate, a place where meanings cannot be read, felt or inferred? Pornographic movies are spliced into mainstream films, circulate
surreptitiously through video stores, piracy markets or though online
spaces that cannot be easily accessed because of regulations and
filters in most places –- colleges, homes, schools, offices, cybercafes
(7) etc. Can we surmise that the transaction of the sexualized gaze with the obscene object has been, in this way, so removed from public gaze that it does not merit discomfort and anxiety for the state or public, unless it nefariously slips into public discourse (DPS MMS, Noida MMS, Mysore Mallige)? As long as it is a secretive (even if mass) consumption, it does not disturb the heternormative familiar and familial in the manner that an object whose obscenity is not quite obvious or clear does – for example, HBO's English movie channel (8).</p>
<p>In this context, let us look at an excerpt from the progressive judgment on Hussain’s painting, which demonstrates the extent to which the court has to read the meanings of an image to determine whether it is obscene or not, but simultaneously, by not ever having to interact with a pornographic text, the court (or the public) does not have to see that there are many meanings embedded in such an image as well.</p>
<p><em>'One of the tests in relation to judging nude/semi nude pictures of women as obscene is also <strong>a particular posture or pose or the surrounding circumstances</strong> which may render it to be obscene, but in the present painting, apart from what is already stated above, the <strong>contours of the woman’s body represent nothing more than the boundaries/map of India.</strong><br /></em></p>
<p><em>Even if a different view had to be taken that if the painter wanted to depict India in human form, it may have been<strong> more appropriate to cloth the woman in some manner may be by draping a sari </strong>or by a flowing cloth etc., but that alone cannot be made a ground to prosecute the painter.</em> <em>There can be a numbers of postures or poses that one can think of which can really stimulate a man’s deepest hidden passions and desires. To my mind, art should not be seen in isolation without going into its onomatopoetic meaning and it is here I quote Mr. Justice Stewart of the US Supreme Court in Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964) who defined ‘obscenity’ as, “I will know it when I see it”. The nude woman in the impugned painting is not shown in any peculiar kind of a pose or posture nor are her surroundings so painted which may arouse sexual feelings or that of lust in the minds of the deviants in order to call it obscene. The </em><em><strong>placement of the Ashoka Chakra</strong> or the States in the painting
is also not on any particular body part of the woman which may be
deemed to show disrespect to the Ashoka Chakra/States and the same was
conceded by the learned counsel for the respondent during the course of
the arguments advanced. </em></p>
<p><em>It is possible that some persons may hold a more orthodox or conservative view on the depiction of Bharat Mata as nude in the painting but that itself would not suffice to give rise to a criminal prosecution of a person like the petitioner who may have more liberal thoughts in respect of mode and manner of depiction of Bharat Mata.' </em>(9)</p>
<p>A body that doesn’t carry inscriptions of cities on different body parts, but is definitely inscribed as Indian is that of Savita Bhabi – from the mangalsutra that never comes off even during doggy-style sex, the sari that slips off rather easily, the bindi, the gestures and mannerisms, to the stories that place her in sexual encounters with familiar people – the bra salesman, the old boyfriend, the cousin, the doctor, the woman colleague, the boss, the aging star and many others.</p>
<p>Savita Bhabhi thus carries as many confusing, jostling meanings as a pornographic text. For instance, she refers to recession and aspirations to become Miss India. She ventures into the fantasy world of her fans, since many of her stories are drawn from their stories on the Savita Bhabi website and fansite –- whether these stories are make-believe or true is irrelevant. These resonances of the text beyond mere sexual arousal are obvious. Even if one were to ignore Linda Williams (10) and inferences from Foucault that pornography becomes one of the many forms in which knowledge of pleasure is organised, it is obvious that from varied perspectives within film studies and legal studies, pornography merits examination. Williams' point also seems to provide some insight into why pornographic circulation doesn't merit much anxiety from the state or in the law; if pornography is organised in consonance with the heteronormative familiar and familial and accessible primarily by men, then maybe it is not such a big surprise that the state or the law is not really invested in controlling pornography, since pornography itself is controlling modes of sexuality and/or sexual expression.</p>
<p>Returning to the comparison, Hussain's untitled nude body on the map of India is literally marked. She carries these inscriptions -- Gujarat on one breast, Bangalore between her thighs, Chennai on her calves, Goa on her hip. Savita Bhabi is marked by her sari, her bindi, her blouse, her aesthetic sense, her fantasies of film stars, her stories of encounters in dressing rooms and myriad other recognizable details -- that mark her as Indian, or at least as living in India, in an Indian (albeit a privileged fair North Indian) body. However, it is Husain's untitled painting -- not called Bharat Mata (and the painting doesn't seem to signify a maternal relation but that of a wounded woman or pained woman) -- that goes to court on charges of obscenity.</p>
<p>Before looking at the few judgments that deal with the actual pornographic text, I take a detour to look at another iconic female figure -- that of Justice. Though clothed, she is blindfolded, so as to be able to discern even a fraction of a slip in the scales of justice; visual cognition would not be sufficient for her to recognise such a slip. As explained by Costas Douzinas, ('The Legality of the Image, lecture – December, 1999), ‘Justice must be blindfolded to avoid the temptation of facing the concrete person and putting individual characteristics before the abstract logic of the institution'. Martin Jay traces the trajectory of how justice became blindfolded through the ages, in the article 'Must Justice Be Blind' (11). Justice was initially wide-eyed and alert; she was blindfolded by the Fool in a period when corruption of the rulers was rampant; she was immortalised by Vermeer as staring at empty scales; and in a transitory state before being completely blinded she had two heads, with a pair of eyes that could see, and a pair that was blindfolded -- shielded, maybe, from the profane and from embarrassment.</p>
<p>I look at this blindness of the judicial system that allows pornography to circulate, while pinning down the obscene and examining minutely its various meanings. The obscene ('Satyam Shivam Sundarmam', 'Prajapati' – a Bengali magazine which carries short stories, 'Lady Chatterley’s Lover', 'Bandit Queen') is examined firstly, for whether it is so gross, though grossness or vulgarity as such is not enough to establish obscenity. And secondly, for whether it has the tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such influences and into whose hands -- or rather, vision -- such an object might fall (this is what allows for the circulation in limited publics -- adult audiences, time slots on television). <br /><br /><strong>Hard and Near Hard Pornography: Close Encounters of the Law with the Profane</strong></p>
<p>In the case of Anonymous vs. the Commissioner Of Police (12), yet another encounter takes place between the embarrassed law and the pornographic text. The excerpt below describes the encounter of two women advocates asked by the court to examine what movies are being exhibited at a specific theatre. In the peculiar clash of social mores, that ensure who has access to pornography, and the law, that ensures equal access to all legally sanctioned media to everyone, the movie theatre was held responsible for violating the fundamental right of women to have access to their premises -- and thus access to pornography. <br /><br /><em>'We approached the booking counter of Rs. 20/- and asked for tickets. The booking clerk first informed us that it is an English movie and it is not meant for ladies to view. When we insisted for tickets, he asked us to come inside the booking room from the main entrance of the theatre. When we were entering the theatre, the gate-man informed us that ladies are not permitted as it is a "SEX MOVIE".</em></p>
<p><em>However, we walked into the booking room. Booking clerk issued us Box-A tickets and further asked us to see the Manager before taking seats. We did not see the Manager but directly went to Box-A and took seats. Even the Box-A doorman asked us to leave the theatre advising us that we being ladies cannot see it as the movie is a "SEX MOVIE". When the movie began at 12.00 P.M. simultaneously the Manager along with two men switched on the lights in Box-A and asked us to leave the hall immediately. Since he repeatedly insisted us to leave, we both came out of Box-A. On coming out we enquired as to why we should not see the movie, to which the Manager replied that it is a "BF". On asking for further clarification of "BF", the Manager stated that it means "BLUE FILM". When we asked him to identify himself, he informed us that he is Mr. Prasad, Manager of the Theatre, as such he has every right to ask us to leave. When we asked as to how it was not advertised that the movie is meant for men only, he retorted that "It is understood that whenever English movies are played in this theatre, ladies are strictly not permitted." As such we were forced to leave the theatre immediately.'</em><br /><br />The question before the court was whether the films exhibited in this theatre were being exhibited in accordance with the censor certificate or whether there was any tampering; whether there was any other device or contrivance to interpolate or intermingle blue films with any otherwise innocent-looking film. Here, though the court had taken it upon itself to address the pornographic text, it ran into a series of complications when merely trying to access the text or the evidence itself, as two women advocates were sent to determine if there was an illegal film exhibition taking place. Pornography seems to be continuously disappearing even on the rare occasion when it is addressed directly by the court, especially in the court's attempt to precisely locate the moment of transaction of the gaze with the pornographic object.</p>
<p>The court, when allowed to examine the film exhibited, found that it was 'a hotch potch of short films, advertisement films, party propaganda films, Hindi and Telugu feature film bits'. (13) The court finally located the pornographic segments (squeezing breasts in a tub, cunnilingus, brutal murder scene) and the court’s comment was that 'normal scenes were replaced by sexy scenes'. The recommendation of those who examined the films that were ostensibly being spliced into <em>Secret Games 3</em> and <em>Dark Dancers</em> is that, 'The only course proper is not to permit entry into the country for such films which prima facie may be <strong>classified hard or near-hard</strong>'. Though the term near-hard is amusing and unique classification of pornography, maybe it's a Freudian slip by a judicial system caught between disgusted arousal and embarrassment.</p>
<p>Finally, in this judgment, the court had to acknowledge its own blindness -- that there is ‘some hole somewhere in the system so that even excised portions by the Censor Board of the films have found their way to the theatres’, including portions that were never passed through the censor certification process at all. <br /><strong><br />Whose Hard-On (or Near Hard-On) Are We Looking for: The Law in Its Search for the Profane</strong><br /><br />In 2005, two teenagers frolicking were captured on a mobile phone camera, and the clip circulated first through mobile phones and then subsequently on the internet. The clip sparked off a phenomenon of hidden camera and mobile phone clips -- a booming pornographic enterprise now on the internet. For a split second, it seemed as though any kind of desire could become pornographic, captured in an ubiquitous medium and transmitted throughout the country. That thrill and anxiety was possibly grasped at slightly in Anurag Kashyap’s <em>Dev.D</em>, where Chanda -- the prostitute, or the other of the good girl -- is the one depicted as the unknown girl who was part of the MMS clip. Very few films have been able to grasp the visceral embarrassment and immediacy of desire as <em>Dev.D</em> does, and it is possibly not the story of Chanda, but that of Paro that achieves this. Paro, who sends nude pictures of herself across continents; Paro, the cyber-sexer; Paro, the entirely relatable slut who cycles with a mattress across fields of mustard in small town Punjab because she desires sex.</p>
<p>After three and a half years (countless MMSs, one movie reference, and a few academic articles later) the court passes judgment in this case – of who possibly can be held liable for the circulation of the MMS clip online, and specifically its sale on Bazee.com (an eBay subsidiary) by an IIT student (Avnish Bajaj vs State on 29/5/2008 by Muralidhar J.). In this case, it is not the pornographic text that keeps slipping and eluding the grasp of the court; the problem is in the inability, especially in the age of the internet, to fix the transactions around such an object that is rapidly changing hands and circulating at an exponential speed through the internet.</p>
<p>The court is in a bind -- the wrong person is accused. Not the corporate body of Bazee but the CEO of Bazee himself (the boy is a juvenile so is facing lesser charges in the juvenile court). The court has the responsibility to fix the blame of the circulation of the obscene object on Avinash Bajaj, without being able to establish that there is any knowledge on his part about the existence of the clip. Though the court was able to establish that there was negligence on the part of Bazee in running the website (in spite of notification, the clip remained on sale for a whole working day after the complaint), and that the filters used by Bazee were obviously inadequate to control what is sold through the website, it was still not possible to find the CEO liable for obscenity charges. If the company had been charged, this would have been possible. Eventually, even though obscenity as a charge couldn’t stick, similar provisions in the IT Act (Section 67 read with Section 85) were used to charge Avinash Bajaj himself, as opposed to Bazee (the corporate body or the company itself). </p>
<p>Here again the court is forced to confront a pornographic text only in instances where there has been a public furore around it, and the eventual judgment is not likely to be able to even remotely address the phenomenon of MMS clips and hidden camera footage from cybercafes and hostels that has been spawned as a result of this incident. The slippery transaction of the gaze with the pornographic object is difficult to fix though in a different way from the earlier judgment – here the pornographic nature of the text is understood rather than examined, more for its violation of privacy than actual elements of obscenity. But it is still hard to determine for the law, especially with the internet, how and by whom has circulation of the pornographic object has taken place and to fix these transactions to ensure legal culpability.</p>
<p>*****<br />Curiously this tale of women advocates and judges as representatives of law and justice, who are averting their gaze from the pornographic text or find that the text is constantly eluding their legal stare, must deal in its closure with the figure of the male judge. Anne McClintock’s male judge in her article ‘Screwing the System’ (14) is a judge who gets a hard-on each time he sentences a prostitute -- a judge who otherwise pays to be beaten by the very same prostitutes. The Hidayatullah paradox of obscenity law is that the judge who decides on obscenity has to decide on the basis of whether he is affected, or rather aroused -- and if he is turned on, then how is he any longer the reasonable judge, or even the 'reasonable man' who can be expected to pass judgment with the dispassionate authority of law? The work of both Shrimoyee N. Ghosh (on the dance bar judgment) and Lawrence Liang (on cinema and the law) on the relation between law and affect, gestures towards an interesting puzzle for us to consider here: if we could look into the eyes of justice, if she were not blindfolded, what would we see? And is the purpose of the blindfold indeed to prevent us from observing the affective life of law itself – its arousal, disgust and embarrassment?</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Endnotes:</strong></p>
<p>1. Ranjit Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra. Only in the recent fairly progressive judgment on Hussain’s painting, that held eventually after examining it, that it was not obscene, was there an attempt at giving some distinction to the category of pornography apart from it being an aggravated form of obscenity and to say that it, as a class of objects, images, paintings, videos, is designed for sexual arousal, while other material which may or may not be obscene is meant to have other meanings. Such reading of the author’s intentions is a convoluted way of restating Justice Potter’s statement – 'I know it (hard core), when I see it'. <br />2. Fatima Riswana v. State Rep. By A.C.P., Chennai & Ors.Case No.: Appeal (crl.) 61-62 of 2005<br />3. -'…in a clear shift of subject matter, what we are now seeing is an explicitly politicized moral censor looking at all this—looking not so much at the sex industry as at society-in-general, at society itself now theatricalised into a morbid stage of sleaze'. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, in his essay ‘Is Realism Pornographic?,’ which deals with the writings of Pramod Navalkar, former Minister for Culture in Maharashtra, points to how explicit or hard-core pornography does not seem to be the concern as much as a whole range of practices attached to the phenomenon of modernity<br />4. Anastasia Guha, The Beatitudes Of A Bountiful Bhabhi, Tehelka, Vol 5, Issue 19, Dated May 17, 2008. Available online at http://www.tehelka.com/story_main39.asp?filename=hub170508the_beatitudes.asp <br />5. Savitha Bhabi threatened, http://infotech.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/3476748.cms <br />6. For instance, the court held that in Bandit Queen, the nudity during the sequence of rape and torture of Phoolan Devi is necessary in the narrative and essential for the impact and the moral that the story is trying to convey – her anger with the upper caste feudal landlords and her quest for justice become identifiable for the viewer, and hence the nudity is in fact necessary in the story, and has no ‘tendency to deprave or corrupt’.<br />7. The regulation of cybercafes takes place in a manner reminiscent of how cinema spaces such as movie theatres were sought to be regulated by the colonial law. Current laws demand placing of computers so monitors face outward, use of identity cards for every visit, data retention for at least a month for most users, etc. <br />8. Though the latter might be a valid assumption (and certainly beneficial for us) it is an assumption whose presumptuous certainties are shaken in the age of the internet, especially that primarily men access pornography and cyber sex through these newly opening up online spaces.<br />9. Maqbool Fida Husain v. Raj Kumar Pandey CRL. REVISION PETITION No. 114/2007. Decided on 08-05-2008</p>
<p>10. Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989<br />11. Costas Douzinas, Lynda Nead (Eds), Law and the Image: the Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law. University of Chicago Press, 1999<br />12. Anonymous Letter-Un-Signed vs The Commissioner Of Police And Others on 26 December, 1996<br />13. For a judicial system that is invested in narrative film or narrative structure for reasons of copyright law (see generally Anne Baron, The Legal Property of Film) or for aesthetic reasons, as is evident from the judgment in Bandit Queen (that held nudity when she was paraded naked in front of the villagers to not be obscene because those scenes are needed for a narrative impact – for people to feel moved and disgusted by Phoolan Devi’s plight) it must also be a different kind of horror to find films chopped up into twenty sundry pieces, the last piece thrown somewhere else.<br />14. Anne McClintock, Screwing the System: Sexwork, Race and the Law, Boundary 2, Vol. 19, No. 2, Feminism and Postmodernism (Summer, 1992), 70-95. <br /><br /></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/the-blindfolded-gaze-of-the-law-and-pornography'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/the-blindfolded-gaze-of-the-law-and-pornography</a>
</p>
No publishernamitahistories of internet in IndiaObscenityinternet and societyArtcybercultureswomen and internetYouTubeCyberculturescyberspacesDigital subjectivitiesHistory2011-08-02T08:37:23ZBlog Entryi4D Interview: Social Networking and Internet Access
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/i4d-interview-social-networking-and-internet-access
<b>Nishant Shah, the Director for Research at CIS, was recently interviewed in i4D in a special section looking at Social Networking and Governance, as a lead up to the Internet Governance Forum in December, in the city of Hyderabad.</b>
<h3 align="left">Mechanism of Self-Governance Needed for Social Networks</h3>
<h3 align="left">Should social networking sites be governed, and if yes, in what way?<br /></h3>
<p align="justify"><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/uploads/nishantshah1.gif/image_preview" alt="Nishant Shah" class="image-left" title="Nishant Shah" />A
call for either monitoring or censoring Social Networking Sites has
long been proved ineffectual, with the users always finding new ways of
circumventing the bans or the blocks that are put into place. However,
given the ubiquitous nature of SNS and the varied age-groups and
interests that are represented there, governance, which is
non-intrusive and actually enables a better and more
effective experience of the site, is always welcome. The presumed
notion of governance is that it will set processes and procedures in
place which will eventually crystallise into laws or regulations.
However, there is also another form of governance - governance as
provided by a safe-keeper or a guardian, somebody who creates symbols
of caution and warns us about being cautious in certain areas. In the
physical world, we constantly face these symbols and signs which remind
us of the need to be aware and safe. Creation of a vocabulary of
warnings, signs and symbols that remind us of the dangers within SNS is
a form of governance that needs to be worked out. This can be a
participatory governance where each community develops its own concerns
and addresses them. What is needed is a way of making sure that these
signs are present and garner the attention of the user.</p>
<p align="justify"><strong>How do we address the concerns that some of the social networking spaces are not "child safe"?</strong> </p>
<p align="justify">The
question of child safety online has resulted in a raging debate. Several models, from the cybernanny to monitoring the child's
activities online ,have been suggested at different times and have
more or less failed. The concerns about what happens to a child online are
the same as those about what happens to a child in the physical world.
When the child goes off to school, or to the park to play, we train and
educate them about things that they should not be doing -- suggesting that they do not talk
to strangers, do not take sweets from strangers, do not tell people
where they live, don't wander off alone -- and hope that these will be
sufficient safeguards to their well being. As an added precaution, we
also sometimes supervise their activities and their media consumption. More than finding technical solutions for
safety online, it is a question of education and training and
some amount of supervision to ensure that the child is complying with
your idea of what is good for it. A call for sanitising the internet is more or less redundant, only, in fact,
adding to the dark glamour of the web and inciting younger users to go
and search for material which they would otherwise have ignored.</p>
<p align="justify"><strong>What are the issues, especially around identities and profile information privacy rights of users of social networking sites?</strong> </p>
<p align="justify">The
main set of issues, as I see it, around the question of identities, is
the mapping of the digital identities to the physical selves. The
questions would be : What constitutes the authentic self? What is the
responsibility of the digital persona? Are we looking at a post-human
world where online identities are equally a part of who we are and are sometimes even more a part of who we are than our physical selves? Does the older argument of the Original
and the Primary (characteristics of Representation aesthetics) still
work when we are talking about a world of 'perfect copies' and
'interminable networks of selves' (characteristics of Simulation)? How
do we create new models of verification, trust and networking within an SNS? Sites like Facebook and Orkut, with their ability to establish
looped relationships between the users, and with the notion of inheritance (¨friend of a friend of a friend of a friend¨), or even testimonials and
open 'walls' and 'scraps' for messaging, are already approaching these
new models of trust and friendship.</p>
<p align="justify"><strong>How do we strike a balance between the freedom of speech and the need to maintain law and order when it comes to monitoring social networking sites?</strong></p>
<p align="justify">I
am not sure if the 'freedom of speech and expression' and the
'maintaining of law and order' need to be posited as antithetical to each
other. Surely the whole idea of 'maintaining law and order' already
includes maintaining conditions within which freedom of speech and
expression can be practiced. Instead of monitoring social networking
sites to censor and chastise (as has happened in some of the recent
debates around Orkut, for example), it is a more fruitful exercise to
ensure that speech, as long as it is not directed offensively
towards an individual or a community, needs to be registered and heard.
Hate speech of any sort should not be tolerated but that is a fact
that is already covered by the judicial systems around the world. </p>
<p align="justify">What
perhaps, is needed online, is a mechanism of self-governance where the
community should be able to decide the kinds of actions and speech
which are valid and acceptable to them. People who enter into trollish
behaviour or hate speak, automatically get chastised and punished in
different ways by the community itself. To look at models of better
self-governance and community mobilisation might be more productive
than producing this schism between freedom of speech on the one hand
and the maintenance of law and order on the other.</p>
<p align="justify"><a class="external-link" href="http://www.i4donline.net/articles/current-article.asp?Title=netgov-Speak:-Lead-up-to-IGF-2008&articleid=2169&typ=Coulum">Link to original article on i4donline.net</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/i4d-interview-social-networking-and-internet-access'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/i4d-interview-social-networking-and-internet-access</a>
</p>
No publishernishantCyberspaceDigital NativesPublic AccountabilityCyberculturesCommunitiesDigital subjectivitiesDigital Pluralism2011-09-22T12:51:57ZBlog EntryCollaborative Projects Programme
http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/collaborative-projects-programme
<b></b>
<p>The Centre for Internet and Society recognises collaboration and
consultation as its primary mode of engaging with research and
intervention. The <strong>Collaborative Projects Programme (CPP)</strong> is CIS’
platform for partnering (intellectually, logistically, financially,
and administratively) with other organisations, individuals and
practitioners in projects which are of immediate concern to the work
that CIS is committed to.</p>
<p>The Collaborative Projects Programme also expands the scope of
research to produce a synergy between research and praxis. The
CPP is, in many ways, the in-house research that CIS undertakes, in
collaboration and consultation with other organisations, institutions
and individuals who have a stake and a say in the field of Internet
and Society. The CPP is not bound by any theme of programmatic
modalities and is envisioned more as a way for CIS to extend its
field and establish a strong network with other exciting spaces in
the Global South.</p>
<p>The Collaborative Projects Programme can include, but is not
limited to, organising of large conferences or workshops; developing
tools for better research and advocacy; data mining towards a
specific goal that complements CIS’ vision; producing original
monographs/publications/books targeted at different audiences;
experimenting with new technologies to affect policy and usage;
implementing pilot studies and instances of existing ideas;
developing schemes to integrate education and technology; public
intervention and awareness campaigns geared towards particular
outcomes; celebrating certain aspects of internet technologies;
engaging with digital natives; and creating new environments of
learning and participation online.</p>
<p>The CPP is <strong>NOT</strong> a grant making programme. However, we are
interested in partnering on new and innovative ideas and would
welcome conversations with people and organisations in the field. If
you have an interesting idea that you think fits our larger vision,
please contact us and we can begin the discussions.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>List of Projects under the Collaborative Projects Programme:</strong></p>
<p>1. The Promise of Invisibility: Technology and the City - A seven month research project initiated by Nishant Shah, in collaboration with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Shanghai University, enabled by a grant from the Asia Scholarship Foundation, Bangkok.</p>
<p>2. Disability, Learning and Digital Participation - in partnership with <a class="external-link" href="http://www.inclusiveplanet.org/">Inclusive Planet</a></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/collaborative-projects-programme'>http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/collaborative-projects-programme</a>
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No publishernishantCyberspaceFamilyDigital NativesPublic AccountabilityObscenitye-governanceCyborgsCyberculturesProjectsNew PedagogiesCommunitiesDigital subjectivitiesDigital Pluralism2011-08-23T03:04:56ZPageRe:wiring Bodies - Dr. Asha Achuthan
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/rewiringdoc
<b>First draft of the monograph on "Rewiring Bodies" by Dr. Asha Achutan; format for Microsoft Office users</b>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/rewiringdoc'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/rewiringdoc</a>
</p>
No publishernishantPublished under a Creative Commons LicenseCyborgsCyberculturesArchivesDigital subjectivitiesResourcesHistory2011-09-21T07:23:44ZFile