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History of the Internet: Building Conceptual Frameworks
http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/history-of-internet-building-conceptual-frameworks
<b>In this module Nishant Shah analyses the understanding of the Internet, cyberspace and everyday life and why do we need to know the history of the internet.</b>
<h3>Introduction: Understanding the Internet</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Let’s begin at the beginning. Before we get into the history of the Internet, it might be a good thing to try and figure out what the Internet is and what exactly are we talking about when we say ‘Internet’. Let’s take a moment and figure out what the Internet is. If you pause right now, and try and define the Internet it is going to be tricky. However, if you look at other media and communication technologies you realise that the same is true for all the other technologies that you daily deal with. Try and define what a book is. Or, what is a film? It is one of the signs that a technology has become internal, personal and ubiquitous that it becomes transparent. It doesn’t require us to think about how it works. Almost like magic, the technologies just ease our way into life and perform crucial tasks of everyday living, without really making their internal mechanics transparent. So it is highly possible that unless you are trained in technologies, you have a vague idea of what the Internet is and how it works.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">At a very basic level, the Internet is a network of computers that are able to talk to each other using a protocol that is popularly known as the TCP/IP suite. That is it. At a most cursory level, that is all there is to the Internet. An extensive network – even a network of network – that makes it possible for billions of users across the globe, to exchange information using digital data, in asynchronous and distributed forms. And this has been historically the case. The origins of the Internet are in military and state funded research in the United States of America in 1960s, where they were developing robust communication networks that could account for redundancy – which is to say that they wanted a network which would function even when particular nodes fell out of service, or certain flow-lines within the network were blocked. A history of the Internet then, will be a history of its technological development – the different protocols, programmes and innovations that allowed for this network to grow out of the defense research labs in the 1960s, be used extensively in American and European academia in the 1980s and then made available to the public in the 1990s. So that is one history that we might need to look at. It is a technological history of the Internet, that allows us to understand what the challenges, strengths, weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the Internet technologies have been and how we have constantly innovated to meet these problems and aspirations.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, as you can imagine, that is a technical history of technology which is well documented, well, on the Internet. A look at the page on Wikipedia<a href="#fn1" name="fr1">[1] </a>will show you all the different technological, institutional and digital innovations that have shaped the Internet from its early days residing on the ARPANET to the global phenomenon that we know now. It is a history of facts and dates, names and numbers and it is easily accessible to anybody who wants to look at the different institutions, technologies and conversations shaped what we understand as the Internet today. You might also want to look at these three different accounts of that history to get the facts,<a href="#fn2" name="fr2">[2] </a>anecdotes<a href="#fn3" name="fr3">[3]</a> and stories<a href="#fn4" name="fr4">[4]</a> in order.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">You will realise from the sources that the Internet is the backbone of our digital experience. It hosts a vast range of services, like peer-2-peer networks, voice and text chats, hypertext documents, and indeed, the most prominent of them all – the World Wide Web. We need to understand that the Internet is thus larger than the World Wide Web and what we have access to, using the WWW, is a very small subset of this larger global digital network. To know the structure of the internet, how it is governed, what are the different inequities, vulnerabilities and problems it creates are important to study because they give us an entry point into understanding how the technological and technical choices that are made affect and impact our everyday concerns around questions of privacy, identity, access, usage, affordability, accessibility etc. These are questions that often get addressed under the rubric of Internet Governance<a href="#fn5" name="fr5">[5] </a>and will be dealt with in the subsequent sessions for this Institute that expand upon the Infrastructure and Institutions that govern the Internet<a href="#fn6" name="fr6">[6]</a> In the meantime, I want to begin with the personal. Instead of beginning with the technological, I want to begin with our everyday experiences on the Internet, and particularly of this thing that we call cyberspace.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Pinning down Cyberspace</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Let’s take a pause and try and answer a hard question: What is Cyberspace? If you thought that defining the Internet was tough, you will quickly realise that defining Cyberspace is going to be even tougher. We know when we are on cyberspace. We use it across a variety of devices and interfaces. We think of ourselves as connected and online for most of our waking (and sleeping) hours. Cyberspace is right there – You will be able to point to it, give examples, even talk about what it facilitates. For example, cyberspace is a virtual space created by digital communication and connection. Or cyberspace is a repository of information that people create globally using computing technologies. Or cyberspace is a space where people manage their social networks. These are all different instances of cyberspace and indicate the wide variety of things that we do when we are online, but they don’t necessarily tell us what cyberspace is.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Like all good things, the origins of the word cyberspace are actually in Science Fiction. William Gibson in his iconic cyberpunk novel ‘NeuroMancer’ (1984), first coined the word cyberspace and defined it thus:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Cyberspace: A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While there are several critiques of Gibson’s description of the word, we must remember that it is fiction and look at it to see what are the conceptual complexities that Gibson is throwing up that are now being discussed in contemporary debates. I want to highlight three things that Gibson’s definition brings up, which might be important to understand how deal and engage with cyberspace.</p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><i>Consensual hallucination</i> – This is probably one of the strongest and the strangest ways of talking about cyberspace. A hallucination is something that happens in your head. It is a space of virtuality. It is an event that nobody except for the one individual who claims it, can verify. It is thus, categorically the non-real. However, a consensual hallucination is a mystifying thing.<br /><br />Let’s say that you propose that from this moment on, you are a dog (even though, as the cartoon famously says, on the internet nobody knows you are a dog). If you were to stand up in your social circles and announce that you are a dog, it would lead to some strange reactions. If you persisted in acting like a dog and responding only to a dog, chances are that you might be put into a mental asylum to be treated of this hallucination. However, if everybody else in the room consented that you are a dog, and indeed, they are all, also dogs, then your hallucination becomes real. It gains valence. It has legitimacy. It becomes a norm.<br /><br />Gibson, in positing cyberspace as a ‘consensual hallucination’ is reminding us that this is indeed, the very way in which our reality is constructed. For instance, think of the colour blue. Now try and figure out how the blue that you are thinking about and the blue that I am thinking about is the same blue. We can’t verify that we are all talking about the same blue. And yet, there is a consensus among us that there is a blueness to the colour blue that we all refer to when we think of the colour blue.<br /><br />Reality is a process of consensual hallucination. So is Cyberspace. Which mean that instead of making the distinction between the real and the virtual, or trying to figure out what is real and what is not, it is more fruitful for us to engage with the idea that the virtual is a part of the real. There are various processes – social, cultural, political, economic, and governmental – that structure and validate our reality. And hence, reality is always changing. The science fiction futures that were dreamt in the last century are the present times that we live in. The idea of consensual hallucination, takes us away from a debate about Virtual Reality and Real Life (VR – RL) that has been endemic to the conversations around cyberspace. Following Gibson’s lead I would encourage us, not to think of cyberspace in terms of the virtual or the unreal, but as a constitutive and generative part of our reality.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><i>A graphic representation of abstracted data:</i> The use of the term ‘space’ is often bewildering in Gibson’s coinage because it does not really seem to appear in the definition. Space, as we understand it, is a location metaphor. It refers to spatial dimensions of a thing. It gives us a sense of fixity. However, these are all expectations of physical space. The ‘space’ in cyberspace has more in common with the abstract concepts of space in mathematics and metaphors rather than in terms of geography and location.<br /><br />We need to understand that even in geographical terms, space is an abstraction of sorts. Space is the virtual or perceived usage, volume and experience of place. If you have a piece of land, that is the place of that land. The place is geographically present. It can be materially touched and located. However, the space is what you attribute to that piece of land. It is defined by the intentions and aspirations, by what is allowed and what is not. Space is a philosophical concept. Which is why, in everyday talk, when you say, ‘I need some space’, you don’t necessarily mean that you need geographical isolation, but often refers to the head-space that is less tangible.<br /><br />Similarly, the space in Cyberspace, even though it has been often used to talk about the space on the network that connects different webpages, or the immersive environments that role playing games offer, or the virtual communities on social networking sites like Facebook, it is important to remember that space is an abstraction. And cyberspace thus is not the actual mechanics and nitty-gritties of technology but what is built because of those interactions.<br /><br />Bruce Sterling, in his introduction to <i>The Hacker Crackdown</i> quite evocatively explains this: ‘Cyberspace is the "place" where a telephone conversation appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the plastic device on your desk. Not inside the other person's phone, in some other city. <b>The place between</b> the phones. [...] in the past twenty years, this electrical "space," which was once thin and dark and one-dimensional—little more than a narrow speaking-tube, stretching from phone to phone—has flung itself open like a gigantic jack-in-the-box. Light has flooded upon it, the eerie light of the glowing computer screen. This dark electric netherworld has become a vast flowering electronic landscape. Since the 1960s, the world of the telephone has cross-bred itself with computers and television, and though there is still no substance to cyberspace, nothing you can handle, it has a strange kind of physicality now. It makes good sense today to talk of cyberspace as a place all its own.”</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Non-space of the mind: In the cyberpunk universe of the novel <i>Neuromancer</i>, Gibson makes a difference between cyberspace and meat-space. There is a definite privileging of cyberspace, which is the world of seduction, adventure, excitement and entertainment. The meat-space, where our biological bodies survive and live, is in a state of collapse and disrepair. This bleak vision of the biological as disintegrating and the digital as becoming the primary mode of existence has been espoused by various science fiction and fantasy narratives. For all of us who have seen <i>The Matrix</i>, we are familiar with this idea that slowly and singularly, we are moving towards creating digital lives which are gaining precedence over our ‘real’ lives.<a href="#fn7" name="fr7">[7]</a> Especially when it comes to the discourse around digital objects, this hierarchy of dismissing the biological and the real over the virtual and the digital is often reinforced. However, Gibson was already reminding us, with the ‘non-space of the mind’ that the digital and the biological are not as separate or discrete as we would have liked to imagine. Let us look at what the ‘non-space’ can mean. For this, we might have to look at two different conceptual moves in philosophy.</li>
</ol>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The first is a distinction between the brain and mind. It is obvious that the brain and the mind are not the same thing. The brain is the biological organ in our cranial cavity. It is made up on cells and neurons, flesh and blood, so to speak. It is what the artificial intelligence scholar Andy Clark calls ‘a skin bag’. The brain performs various functions that keep our body alive and sapient. The mind, is an abstraction of the brain. The mind is our thoughts, memories, associations, feelings, and all the other things that make us human. The brain might support the mind but they are not the same. I hope that this is beginning to sound familiar to us – that the brain-mind relationship is the same as we have mapped out for Internet-Cyberspace. Just like cyberspace is an abstraction of data that we have consented to be real, the mind is also an abstraction that encapsulates the interiority of our selves.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The second is an understanding of binaries and opposites. We are designed, as human beings (even though we attribute this to the digital machines) to think in binaries. Black-White, Good-Bad, Day-Night. This is the way in which our cultures have been built. We think of the positive and the negative and create a spectrum in between to understand our world. These binaries are often confused with being opposites. So we would say that the opposite of Black is white. Or that the opposite of Day is Night. However, in the study of Logics, we are taught that the binary is not the same as opposite. All the way back in history, Aristotle had already posited that it is a fallacy to mistake a binary for an opposite. So, for instance the binary opposition of ‘day’ might be ‘night’, but the logical opposite of ‘day’ is ‘non-day’. Or to make it simpler, the binary opposition of the colour ‘black’ is ‘white’. However, the logical opposite of ‘black’ is ‘non-black’ and hence every other colour that is not black, is its logical opposite. We go through this to realise that in the brain-mind mapping, the brain is the place. The mind is the non-brain, or the space. And then the non-space of the mind, is the brain all over again. Gibson does this recursive negation to remind us that the things that happen in cyberspace have direct consequences on meatspace. What happens in cyberspace directly affects the non-space of our bodies, our lived realities and experiences. </li>
</ul>
<h3>Cyberspace and Everyday Life</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It is important to begin with the definition that Gibson offered because it informs a lot of the debates that happened historically, around cyberspace and how we understand it. However, it also allows us to side-step these debates because they are not fruitful. They reinforce the idea that the internet and cyberspace are removed from our reality, that they are technological concerns rather than human, social and political concerns, and they insist that the internet and cyberspace are in opposition to being human. These ideas produce accounts of the internet and cyberspace which, for me, are fruitless. The leads from Gibson’s definition, instead, allow us to understand the internet and cyberspace as deeply implicated in our conditions of being human, being social and being political. They offer us a different way of rewriting the history of the Internet, not merely as a linear narrative of the technological advancements, but as a rich and complex account of how the internet and cyberspace have shaped and been shaped by the social, cultural and political milieu that they have emerged in.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">And so, we approach the history of the internet in a different way. Instead of looking at the Internet as a technology, we deal with the Internet in its many forms, through cyberspace and our everyday engagement with it. Or, rather, we formulate the history of Internet & Society, thus trying to look at the ways in which the emergence of digital technologies – Internet and cyberspace – have led to questioning the ways in which understand our personal, social and political lives, and how, in-turn they have been changed through the various contexts that we live in.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Why do we need the history of the Internet?</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">So here is the million dollar question. Why do we need to study the history of the Internet? And if we do, for what do we need to study the history of the internet? These are both important questions and this is where I am hoping we will be able to start a critical inquiry into our own engagement with the topic.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Let us begin by questioning the very structure of history writing. What does it mean to write the history of an particular object? If we were to write, let’s say, the history of a particular building. How far in time will we go? And in what minutiae shall we record it? Shall we begin by saying, how, once where the building stood, there was a tree. And on that trees, there were leaves. The first leaf fell. The second leaf fell. The third leaf fell. It could fill up pages documenting every leaf that fell, before we even come to the building. So we know that when we write the history of a particular object, person or phenomenon, there is a very clear notion of where the history began. But we also know that if, we had an interest in the ecological history of the building, we might have actually spent time looking at that tree and its falling leaves. Which means that what constitutes history also has to do with our intentions of writing it.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">And then the last point about this brief capsule on history writing that I want to make, is that history of things does not mean that we focus only on the thing. If we were to look at the cultural significance of the building under question, for example, we would talk to the society that engages with it, the people who occupy it, and the ways in which it shapes the fabric of the space and time. So history is often a large canvas – it might keep one particular object in question, but it also weaves in the complex structure of processes and flows that surround that particular object of study.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There is a rich scholarship about the problems, structures and processes of history writing. But these three points are important for us to think through why we want to delve into the history of the internet. Where do we begin? What do we study? And why do we study what we study? The minute you put these questions out, you start realising that there can be no definitive history of the internet. There can definitely not be just one history of the internet. And that the history of the internet is as much about the world as it is about the technological, but the technological only becomes a lens or an entry point into unravelling the various questions that are a part of our personal and professional lives. So we are not looking at imparting the one authoritative history of the internet. Instead, I am proposing, for this module to introduce you to different ways of thinking about the history of the internet.</p>
<p>We are going to begin by looking at not the Internet – but cyberspace.</p>
<p>We are going to examine the intersections of cyberspace with three different objects and try and see how the debates at that intersection help us to define and entry point into the rich discourse around Internet & Society.</p>
<p><b>The body in cyberspace<br /></b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Perhaps one of the most interesting histories of the cyberspace has been its relationship with the body. Beginning with the meatspace-cyberspace divide that Gibson introduces, the question of our bodies’ relationship with the internet has been hugely contested. There have been some very polarized debates around this question. Where are we when we are online? Are we the person in the chair behind an interface? Are we the avatar in a social networking site interacting with somebody else? Are we a set of data running through the atmosphere? Are we us? Are we dogs? These are tantalising and teasing questions.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Early debates around the body-technology questions were polarized. There were people who offered that the cyberspace is a virtual space. What happens in that make-believe, performative space does not have any direct connections with who we are and how we live. They insisted that the cyberspace is essentially a performance space, and just like acting in a movie does not make us the character, all our interactions on the internet are also performances. The idea of a virtual body or a digital self were proposed, thinking of the digital as an extension of who we are – as a space that we occupy to perform different identities and then get on with our real lives.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sherry Turkle, in her book <i>Life on the Screen</i>, was the first one to question this binary between the body and the digital self. Working closely with the first users of the online virtual reality worlds called Multiple User Dungeons, Turkle notes how being online started producing a different way of thinking about who we are and how we relate to the world around us. She indicates three different ways in which this re-thinking happens. The first, is at the level of language. She noticed how the users were beginning to think of their lives and their social relationships through the metaphors that they were using in the online world. So, for instance, people often thought of life through the metaphor of windows – being able to open multiple windows, performing multiple tasks and identities and ‘recycling’ them in their everyday life. Similarly, people saying that they are ‘low on bandwidth’ when they don’t have enough time and attention to devote to something, or thinking about the need to ‘upgrade’ our senses. We also are quite used to the idea that memory is something that resides on a chip and that computing is what machines do. These slippages in language, where we start attributing the machine characteristics to human beings are the first sign of understanding the human-technological relationship and history.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The second slippage is when the user start thinking of the avatars as human. We are quite used to, in our deep web lives, to think of machines as having agency. Our avatars act. Things that we do on the internet perform more actions than we have control of – a hashtag that we start on twitter gets used and responded to by others and takes on a life of its own. We live with sapient technologies – machines that care, artificial intelligence algorithms that customise search results for us, scripts and bots that protect us from malware and viruses. We haven’t attributed these kinds of human agencies to machines and technologies in the past. However, within the digital world, there is a complex network of actors, where all the actors are not always human. Bruno Latour, a philosopher of science and technology, posits in his ‘Actor Network Theory’ that the emergence of these non-human actors has helped us understand that we are not only dependent on machines and technologies for our everyday survival, but that many tasks that we had thought of as ‘human’ are actually performed, and performed better by these technologies. Hence, we have come to care for our machines and we also think of them as companions and have intimate relationships with them. And the machines, even as they make themselves invisible, start becoming more personal.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The third slippage that Turkle points out is the way in which the boundaries between the interior and the exterior were dissolved in the accounts of the users’ narratives of their digital adventures. There is a very simplistic understanding that what is human is inside us, it is sacred and organic and emotional. Earlier representational technology products like cinema, books, TV etc. have emphasised this distinction between real life and reel life. No actor is punished for the crime they commit in the narrative of a film. It is not very often that an author claims to be the character in a book. We have always had a very strong sense of distinction between the real person and the fictional person. But within the virtual reality worlds, these distinctions seem to dematerialize. The users not only thought of their avatars as human but also experienced the emotions, frustrations, excitement and joy that their characters were simulating for them. And what is more important, they claimed these experiences for themselves.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Namita Malhotra, who is a legal scholar and a visual artist, in her monograph on Pleasure, Porn and the Law, looks at the way in which we are in a process of data-stripping – constant revelation of our deepest darkest secrets and desires, within the user generated content rubric. Looking at the low-res, grainy videos on sites like YouTube and Vimeo, which have almost no narrative content and are often empty of sexual content, produce all of us in a global orgiastic setting, where our bodies are being extended beyond ourselves. In the monograph, Malhotra argues that the Internet is not merely an extension but almost like a third skin that we wear around ourselves – it is a wrapper, but it is tied, through ligaments and tendons, to the flesh and bone of our being, and often things that we do online, even when they are not sexual in nature, can become pornographic. Conversely, the physical connections that we have are now being made photographically and visually available in byte sized morsels, turned into a twitpic, available to be shared virally, and disseminated using mobile applications, thus making our bodies escape the biological containers that we occupy but also simultaneously marks our bodies through all these adventures that we have on the digital infobahn.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Case Study: A Rape in Cyberspace<br /></b>A contemporary of Sherry Turkle, Julian Dibbell, in his celebrated account of ‘A Rape in Cyberspace’<b> </b><a href="#fn8" name="fr8">[8] </a>describes a case-study that corroborates many of the observations that Turkle posits. Dibbell analyses a particular incident that occurred one night in a special kind of MUD – LambdaMOO (MUD, Object-Oriented) – which was run by the Xerox Research Corporations. A MUD, is a text-based virtual reality space of fluid dimensions and purposes, where users could create avatars of themselves in textual representations. Actions and interactions within the MUD are also in long running scripts of texts. Of course, technically all this means that a specially designed database gives users the vivid impression of their own presence and the impression of moving through physical spaces that actually exists as descriptive data on some remotely located servers.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">When users log into LambdaMoo, the program presents them with a brief textual description of one of the rooms (the coat closet) in the fictional database mansion. If the user wants to navigate, s/he can enter a command to move in a particular direction and the database replaces the original description with new ones, corresponding to the room located in the direction s/he chose. When the new description scrolls across the user’s screen, it lists not only the fixed features of the room but all its contents at that moment – including things (tools, toys, weapons), as well as other avatars (each character over which s/he has sole control). For the database program that powers the MOO, all of these entities are simply subprograms or data structures which are allowed to interact according to rules very roughly mimicking the laws of the physical world.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Characters may leave the rooms in particular directions. If a character says or does something (as directed by its user), then the other users who are located in the same ‘geographical’ region within the MOO, see the output describing the utterance or action. As the different players create their own fantasy worlds, interacting and socialising, a steady script of text scrolls up a computer screen and narratives are produced. The avatars, as in Second Life or even on Social Networking Sites like Orkut, have the full freedom to define themselves, often declining the usual referents of gender, sexuality, and context to produce fantastical apparitions. It is in such an environment of free-floating fantasy and role-playing, of gaming and social interaction mediated by digital text-based avatars, that a ‘crime’ happened.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Dibell goes on to give an account of events that unfolded that night. In the social lounge of LambdaMoo, which is generally the most populated of all the different nooks, corners, dimensions and rooms that users might have created for themselves, there appeared an avatar called Dr. Bungle. Dr. Bungle had created a particular program called Vodoo Doll, which allowed the creator to control avatars which were not his own, attributing to them involuntary actions for all the other players to watch, while the targeted avatars themselves remained helpless and unable to resist any of these moves. This Dr. Bungle, through his evil Vodoo Doll, took hold of two avatars – legba and Starsinger and started controlling them. He further proceeded to forcefully engage them in sexually violent, abusive, perverted and reluctant actions upon these two avatars. As the users behind both the avatars sent a series of invective and a desperate plea for help, even as other users in the room (# 17) watched, the Vodoo Doll made them enter into sexually degrading and extremely violent set of activities without their consent. The peals of his laughter were silenced only when a player with higher powers came and evicted Dr. Bungle from the Room # 17. As an eye-witness of the crime and a further interpolator with the different users then present, Dibbell affirms that most of the users were convinced that a crime had happened in the Virtual World of the digital Mansion. That a ‘virtual rape’ happened and was traumatic to the two users was not questioned. However, what this particular incident brought back into focus was the question of space.</p>
<p>Dibbell suggests that what we had was a set of conflicting approaches to understand the particular phenomenon:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Where virtual reality and its conventions would have us believe that legba and Starsinger were brutally raped in their own living room, here was the victim legba scolding Mr. Bungle for a breach of *civility* … [R]eal life, on the other hand, insists the incident was only an episode in a free-form version of Dungeons and Dragons, confined to the realm of the symbolic and at no point threatening any players life, limb, or material well-being…’</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The meaning and the understanding of this particular incident and the responses that it elicited, lie in the ‘buzzing, dissonant gap’ between the perceived and experienced notion of Technosocial Space. The discussions that were initiated within the community asked many questions: If a crime had happened, where had the crime happened? Was the crime recognised by law? Are we responsible for our actions performed through a digital character on the cyberspaces? Is it an assault if it is just role playing?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The lack of ‘whereness’ of the crime, or rather the placelessness of the crime made it especially more difficult to pin it to a particular body. The users who termed the event as rape had necessarily inverted the expected notion of digital space as predicated upon and imitative of physical space; they had in fact done the exact opposite and exposed digital spaces as not only ‘bleeding into reality’ but also a constitutive part of the physical spaces. Their Technosocial Space was not the space of the LambdaMoo Room # 17 but the physical locations (and thus the bodies, rather than the avatars) of the players involved. However, this blurring was not to make an easy resolution of complex metaphysical questions. This blurring was to demonstrate, more than ever, that the actions and pseudonymous performances or narratives which are produced in the digital world are not as dissociated from the ‘Real’ as we had always imagined. More importantly, the notional simulation of place or a reference to the physical place is not just a symbolic gesture but has material ramifications and practices. As Dibell notes in his lyrical style,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">‘Months later, the woman in Seattle would confide to me that as she wrote those words posttraumatic tears were streaming down her face -- a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that the words’ emotional content was no mere playacting. The precise tenor of that content, however, its mingling of murderous rage and eyeball-rolling annoyance, was a curious amalgam that neither the RL nor the VL facts alone can quite account for.’</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The eventual decision to ‘toad’ Dr. Bungle – to condemn him to a digital death (a death only as notional as his crime) and his reappearance as another character take up the rest of Dibbell’s argument. Dibbell is more interested in looking at how a civil society emerged, formed its own ways of governance and established the space of LamdaMOO as more than just an emotional experience or extension; as a legitimate place which is almost as much, if not more real, than the physical places that we occupy in our daily material practices. Dibbell’s moving account of the entire incident and the following events leading the final ‘death’ and ‘reincarnation’ has now been extrapolated to make some very significant and insightful theorisations of the notions of the body and its representations online.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Exercise: Based on this case-study, break into small groups to determine whether a rape happened on cyberspace and how we can understand the relationship of our online personas with our bodies. </i></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Cyberspace and the State</b><br />The history of body and technology is one way of approaching the history of the internet. However, as we realise, that more than the management of identity or the projection of our interiority, it is a narrative about governance. How does the body get regulated on the internet? How does it become the structure through which communities, networks, societies and collective can be imagined? The actions and transactions between the internet and the body can also help us to look at the larger questions of state, governance and technology which are such an integral part of our everyday experience of the internet. Questions of privacy, security, piracy, sharing, access etc. are all part of the way in which our practices of cultural production and social interaction are regulated, by the different intermediaries of the internet, of which the State is one.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Asha Achuthan, in her landmark work Re:Wiring Bodies<a href="#fn9" name="fr9">[9]</a> that looks at the history of science and technology in India, shows that these are not new concerns. In fact, as early as the 1930s and 1940s, when the architects of India’s Independence movements were thinking about shaping what the country is going to look like in the future, they were already discussing these questions. It is more popularly known that Jawaharlal Nehru was looking to build a ‘scientific temperament’ for the country and hoping to build it through scientific institutions as well as infrastructure – he is famously credited to having said that ‘dams are the temples of modern science.’ Apart from Nehru’s vision of a modern India, there was a particular conversation between M.K. Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, that Achuthan analyses in great detail. Achuthan argues that the dialogue between Gandhi and Tagore is so couched in ideology, poetry and spirituality that we often forget that these were actually conversations about a technology – specifically, the charkha or the spinning wheel.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">For both Gandhi and Tagore, the process of nation building was centred around this one particular charkha. The charkha was the mobile, portable, wearable device (much like our smart phones) that was supposed to provide spiritual salvation and modern resources to overcome the evils of both traditional and conservative values as well as unemployment and production. The difference in Gandhi and Tagore was not whether the charkha – as a metaphor of production and socio-economic organisation – should be at the centre of our discourse. The difference was that Gandhi thought that the usage of charka, complete immersion in the activity, and the devotion to it would help us weave a modern nation For Gandhi, the citizen was not somebody who used the charkha, but the citizen was somebody who becomes a citizen in the process of using the charkha. Tagore, meanwhile, was more concerned about whether we are building a people-centred nation or a technology-centred device. He was of the opinion that building a nation with the technology at its core, might lead to an apocalyptic future where the ‘danava yantra’ or demonic machine might take over and undermine the very human values and ideals that we are hoping to structure the nation through.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">If you even cursorily look at this debate, you will realise that the way Gandhi was talking about the charkha is in resonance with how contemporary politicians talk about the powers of the internet and the way in which, through building IT Cities, through foreign investment, through building a new class of workers for the IT industry, and through different confluences of economic and global urbanisation, we are going to Imagine India<a href="#fn10" name="fr10">[10]</a> of the future. Similarly, the caution that Tagore had, of the charkha as superseding the human, finds its echoes in the sceptics who have been afraid that the human is being forgotten<a href="#fn11" name="fr11">[11]</a> in the e-governance systems that are being set up, which concentrate more on management of data and information rather than the rights and the welfare of people.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This historical continuity between technology and governance, also finds theorisation in Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s book The Cultural Last Mile<a href="#fn12" name="fr12">[12] </a>that looks at the critical turns in India’s governance and policy history and how the technological paradigm has been established. Rajadhyaksha opens up the State-technology-governance triad to more concrete examples and looks at how through the setting up of community science centres, the building of India’s space and nuclear programmes, and through on-the-ground inventions like radio and chicken-mesh wire-loops, we have tried to reinforce a broadcast based model of governance. Rajadhyaksha proposes that the earlier technologies of governance which were at our disposal, helped us think of the nation state through the metaphor of broadcast. So we had the State at the Centre, receiving and transmitting information, and in fact managing all our conversation and communication by being the central broadcasting agency. And hence, because the state was responsible for the message of the state reaching every single person, but also responsible that every single person can hypothetically communicate with every other single person, the last mile became important. The ability to reach that last person became important. And the history of technology and governance has been a history of innovations to breach that last mile and make the message reach without noise, without disturbance, and in as clean and effective a way as possible.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">With the emergence of the digital governance set up, especially with the building of the Unique Identity Project,<a href="#fn13" name="fr13">[13]</a> we now have the first time when the government is not concerned about breaching the last mile. The p2p networks that are supposed to manage the different flows of information mean that the State is not a central addressee of our communication but one of the actors. It produces new managers – internet service providers, telecom infrastructure, individual hubs and connectors, traditional media agencies – that help us think of governance in a new way. Which is why, for instance, with the UID authorities, we are no longer concerned about the relay of state information from the centre to the subject. Hence, we have many anecdotal stories of people enrolling for the Aadhaar card without actually knowing what benefits it might accrue them. We also have stories coming in about how there are people with Aadhaar numbers which have flawed information but these are not concerns. Because for once, the last mile has to reach the Government. The State is a collector but there are also other registrars. And there is a new regime here, where the government is now going to become one of the actors in the field of governance and it is more interested in managing data and information rather than directly governing the people.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This historical turn is interesting, because it means that we are being subjected to different kinds of governance structures and institutions, without necessarily realising how to negotiate with them to protect us. One of the most obvious examples, is the Terms of Services<a href="#fn14" name="fr14">[14]</a> that we almost blindly sign off when using online platforms and services and what happens when they violate rights that we think are constitutionally given. What happens when Facebook removes some content from your profile without your permission because it thinks that it is problematic? Who do you complain to? Are your rights as a user or a citizen? Which jurisdiction will it fall under? Conversely, what happens when you live in a country that does not grant you certain freedoms (of speech and expression, for instance) and you commit an infraction using a social media platform. What happens when your private utterances on your social networks make you vulnerable<a href="#fn15" name="fr15">[15]</a> to persecution and prosecution in your country?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">These are all questions of the human, the technological, and the governmental which have been discussed differently and severally historically, in India and also at the global level. Asking these questions, unpacking the historical concerns and how they have leap-frogged in the contemporary governmental debates is important because it helps us realise that the focus of what is at stake, what it means to be human, what we recognise as fair, just and equal are also changing in the process. Instead of thinking of e-governance as just a digitization of state resources, we have to realise that there is a certain primacy that the technologies have had in the state’s formation and manifestation, and that the digital is reshaping these formulations in new and exciting, and sometimes, precarious ways.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Cyberspace and Criminality<br /></b>The history of the internet in India, but also around the world, is bookended between pornography and terrorism. While there has been an incredible promise of equity, equality, fairness, and representation of alternative voices on the internet, there is no doubt that what the internet has essentially done is turn us all into criminals – pornographers, pirates, terrorists, hackers, lurkers… If you have been online, let us just take for granted that you have broken some law or the other, no matter how safe you have been online, and where you live. The ways in which the internet has facilitated peer-2-peer connections and the one-one access means that almost everything that was governed in the public has suddenly exploded in one large grey zone of illegality.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Ravi Sundaram calls this grey zone of illegal or semi-legal practices the new ‘cyberpublics’. For Sundaram, the new public sphere created by the internet is not only in the gentrified, middle-class, educated people who have access to the cyberspaces and are using social media and user generated content sites to bring about active social and political change. More often than not, the real interesting users of the internet are hidden. They access the internet from cybercafés, in shared names. They have limited access to the web through apps and services on their pirated phones. They share music, watch porn, gamble, engage in illicit and surreptitious social and sexual engagements and they are able to do this by circumventing the authority and the gaze of the law.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On the other side are the more tech savvy individuals who create alternative currencies like Bitcoin, trade for weapons, drugs and sex on SilkRoute, form guerrilla resistance groups like Anonymous, and create viruses and malware that can take over the world. These cyberpublics are not just digital in nature. They erupt regularly in the form of pirate bazaars, data swaps, and the promiscuous USB drive that moves around the machines, capturing information and passing it on further. These criminalities are often the defining point of internet policy and politics – they serve as the subjects that need to be governed, as well as the danger that lurks in the digital ether, from which we need to be protected. For Sundaram, the real contours and borders of the digital world are to be tested in an examination of these figures. Because, as Lawrence Liang suggests, the normative has already been assimilated in the system. The normative or the good subject is no longer a threat and has developed an ethical compass of what is desirable and not. However, this ethical subject also engages in illicit activities, while still producing itself as a good person. This contradiction makes for interesting stories.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>DPS MMS: Case Study<br /></b>One of the most fascinating cases of criminality that captured both public and legal attention was the notoriously cases where the ideas of Access were complicated in the Indian context, was the legal and public furore over the distribution of an MMS (Multi-Media Message) video that captured two underage young adults in a sexual act. The clip, which was dubbed in popular media as ‘DPS Dhamaka’ became viral on the internet. The video clip was listed on an auction (peer-2-peer) website as an e-book and as ‘Item 27877408 – DPS Girl having fun!!! Full video + Bazee points’ for Rs. 125. This visibility of the clip on the auction site Bazee.com, brought it to the eyes of the State where its earlier circulation through private circuits and P2P networks had gone unnoticed. Indeed, the newspapers and TV channels had created frenzy around it, this video clip would have gone unnoticed. However, the attention that Bazee.com drew led to legal intervention.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Following the visibility of the video clip, there was an attempt to find somebody responsible for the crime and be held liable for the ‘crime’ that had happened. Originally, Ravi Raj, a student at IIT Kharagpur, who had put up the clip on Bazee was arrested for possessing and selling pornography. He was arrested and kept in police custody for at least three days and so was the male student who made the clip. They were both made to go through proceedings in juvenile court (though he was the last to be arrested). Both the students in the video were suspended from school after the incident. Eventually, the most high profile arrest and follow up from the DPS MMS incident was the arrest of the CEO of Bazee.com – Avnish Bajaj. However, Bajaj was released soon because as the host of the platform and not its content, he had no liability.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This is the beginning of a series of slippages where a punishable body in the face of public outcry had to be identified. We witnessed a witch-hunt that sought to hold the boy who made the video clip responsible, the student of IIT who attempted to circulate the clip and eventually the CEO of Bazee. The string of failed prosecutions seems to indicate that the pornographer-as-a-person was slipping through the cracks of the legal system. As Namita Malhotra argues, it is not the pornographic object which is ‘eluding the grasp of the court’ but that it seems to be an inescapable condition of the age of the internet - that the all transactions are the same transactions, and all users are pornographers.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We can see in the case that the earlier positions that were easily criminalised when it came to objects in mass media – producer, consumer, distributor of obscenity, were vacated rapidly in the DPS MMS case. We have a case where the bodies, when looked at through simplified ideas of Access, could not be regulated. The girl in the clip could not be punished because she was the victim in the case that could be read as statutory rape. In the case of the boy, a stranger argument was posed – ‘that in our fast urbanising societies where parents don’t have time for children, they buy off their love by giving them gadgets – which makes possible certain kinds of technological conditions...thus the blame if it is on the boy, is on the larger society’ (Malhotra, 2011).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Eventually, the court held that the description of the object and the context of its presence indicates that the said obscene object is just a click away and such a ‘listing which informed the potential buyer that such a video clip that is pornographic can be procured for a price’. There is a suggestion that there was nobody in particular that could be fixed with the blame. What was at blame was access to technology and conditions of technology within which the different actors in this case were embedded. Malhotra points out that in earlier cases around pornography, judgements have held pornography responsible for itself.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the case of the DPS MMS, it seemed that technology – especially access to technology by unsupervised persons – has taken that role. The eventual directive that came out of this case was a blanket warning issued to the public that ‘anyone found in possession of the clip would be fined and prosecuted’. It is as if the attention of the court was on the ways in which the video clip was produced, circulated and disseminated, rather than the content. There was an anxiety around peoples’ unsupervised access to digital technologies, the networks that facilitated access to content without the permission of the state, and modes of circulation and dissemination that generated high access to audiences which cannot be controlled or regulated.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The State’s interest in this case, is not in the sexual content of the material but in the way it sidesteps the State’s authorial positions and produces mutable, transmittable, and transferable products as well as conditions of access. Such a focus on practices and behaviours around the obscene object, rather than the content itself, seems not to disrupt the law’s neat sidestepping of the force of the image itself. These different tropes of access to technology informed the State’ attempt at control and containment of technosocial practices in the country, giving rise to imaginations of the User as being in conditions of technology which make him/her a potential criminal. This idea of access as transgression or overriding the legal regulatory framework does not get accounted for in the larger technology discourse. However, it does shape and inform the Information Technology regulations which are made manifest in the IT Act. The DPS MMS case complicated the notion of access and posited a potentially criminal technosocial subject who, because of access to the digital, will be able to consume information and images beyond the sanction of the law.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The DPS MMS case shows how the ways in which public discourse can accuse, blame and literally hang technology seems to diverge from how the court attempts to pin down an offence or crime and prosecute by constructing a technosocial subject as the pervert, while also accusing pornography as a phenomenon. The court is unable to hold technology to blame but the accused is technology-at-large and modernity, which subsumes practices around technology and separates out the good and ethical ways in which a citizen should access and use technologies to rise from the potentially criminal conditions of technology within which their Technosocial identity is formed.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">Summary</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We started by making a distinction between Internet and Cyberspace to see how the two are separate objects of focus and have a relationship that needs to be examined in greater detail. It was argued that while the Internet – in material, infrastructural and technological forms – is important to understand the different policies and politics at the local, regional and global level, it has an account that is easier to follow. Cyberspace, on the other hand, because it deals with human interactions and experiences, allows for a more complex set of approaches into understanding our engagement with the digital domain. We began with the original definitions and imaginations of cyberspace and the ways in which it founded and resolved debates about the real-virtual, the physical-digital, and the brain-mind divides which have been historically part of the cybercultures discourse.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It was proposed, hence, that instead of looking at the history of the Internet, we will look at the history of cyberspace, and see if we can move away from a straight forward historical narrative of the Internet which focuses largely on the institutions, numbers, names and technological advances. The ambition was not to just produce a similar history of cyberspace but think of conceptual frameworks through which cyberspace can be studied. The proposition was that instead of just looking at history as a neutral and objective account of events and facts, we can examine how and why we need to create histories. Also, that it is fruitful to look at the aspirations and ambitions we have in creating historical narratives.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It was then suggested that instead of trying to create a definitive history, or even a personal history of the internet, it might be more fruitful to look at the intersections that cyberspace has with different questions and concerns that have historically defined the relationship between technologies and society. 3 different conceptual frameworks were introduced as methods or modes by which this historical mode of inquiry can be initiated.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The first framework examined how we can understand the boundaries and contours of the internet and cyberspace by looking at its relationship with our bodies. The ways in which we understand our bodies, the mediation by technologies, and the extensions and simulations that we live with, help us to understand the human-technology relationship in more nuanced fashions. Looking at the case-study of a rape that happened in cyberspace, we mapped out the different ways in which we can think of a technosocial relationship.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The second framework drew from historical debates around technology and governance to see how the current concerns of e-governance and digital subjectivity are informed by older debates about technology and nation building. Looking at the dialogues between Gandhi and Tagore, and then the imagination of a nation through the broadcast technologies, we further saw how the new modes of networked governance are creating new actors, new conditions and new contexts within which to locate and operate technologies.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The third framework showed how the technological is not merely at the service of the human. In fact, the presence of the technological creates new identities and modes of governance that create potential criminals of all of us. Through the case-study of the DPS MMS, and in an attempt to look at the grey zone of illegal cyberpublics, we saw how at new technosocial identities are created at the intersection of law, technology, governance and everyday practices of the web. The fact that the very condition of technology access can create us as potential criminals, in need to be governed and regulated, reflects in the development of internet policy and governance.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It was the intention of this module to complicate three sets of presumptions and common knowledge that exist in the discourse around Internet and Cyberspace. The first was to move away from thinking of the Internet merely as infrastructure and networks. The second was to suggest that entering the debates around human-technology everyday relationships would offer more interesting ways of looking at accounts of the technological. The third was to propose that the history of the internet does not begin only with the digital, but it needs larger geographical and techno-science contexts in order to understand how the contemporary landscape of internet policy and governance is shaped.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The module was not designed to give a comprehensive history and account of the internet. Instead, it built a methodological and conceptual framework that would allow us to examine the ways in which we approach Internet and Society questions – in the process, it would also help us reflect on our own engagement, intentions and expectations from the Internet and how we create the different narratives and accounts for it.</p>
<ol> </ol>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr1" name="fn1">1</a>]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr2" name="fn2">2</a>]. http:\www.sigcomm.org\sites\default\files\ccr\papers\2009\October\1629607-1629613.pdf</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr3" name="fn3">3</a>]. http://www.walthowe.com/navnet/history.html</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr4" name="fn4">4</a>]. http:\www.internetsociety.org\internet\what-internet\history-internet\brief-history-internet</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr5" name="fn5">5</a>]. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Governing_the_Internet/Introduction_to_Internet_Governance</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr6" name="fn6">6</a>]. Recommended reading: Internet Governance: Infrastructure and Institutions eds. Lee Bygrave and Jon Bing http://www.amazon.com/Internet-Governance-Infrastructure-Institutions-Bygrave/dp/0199561133</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr7" name="fn7">7</a>]. Recommended watching material to look at some of these questions: 1. The final flight of the Osiris -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueiBYxI6Eqg 2. The Second Renaissance - part 1 - http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/n5vpzw/the-second-renaissance-part-i 3. The Second Ranaissance - part 2 - http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/va807i/animatrix-second-renaissance-part2</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr8" name="fn8">8</a>]. http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/a-rape-in-cyberspace/</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr9" name="fn9">9</a>]. http://cis-india.org/raw/rewiringdoc/view</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr10" name="fn10">10</a>]. http://www.amazon.com/Imagining-India-Idea-Renewed-Nation/dp/0143116673</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr11" name="fn11">11</a>]. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/670950</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr12" name="fn12">12</a>]. http://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/last-cultural-mile.pdf</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr13" name="fn13">13</a>]. http://eprints.cscsarchive.org/532/</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr14" name="fn14">14</a>]. http://tosdr.org/</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr15" name="fn15">15</a>]. http://www.amazon.com/The-Googlization-Everything-Should-Worry/dp/0520258827</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/history-of-internet-building-conceptual-frameworks'>http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/history-of-internet-building-conceptual-frameworks</a>
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No publishernishantInternet Access2014-01-08T07:56:16ZPageWorld Wide Rule
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-june-14-2013-nishant-shah-world-wide-rule
<b>Nishant Shah's review of Schmidt and Cohen's book was published in the Indian Express on June 14, 2013.</b>
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<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/world-wide-rule/1129208/0">Click to read the original published in the Indian Express here</a></p>
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<p><b>Book: The New Digital Age</b><b><br />Author: Eric Schmidt & Jared Cohen<br /></b><b>Publisher: Hachette</b><b><br />Price: Rs 650<br />Pages: 315</b></p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">When I first heard that Eric Schmidt the chairman of Google and Jared Cohen, the director of the techno-political think-tank Google Ideas, are co-authoring a book about our future and how it is going to be re-shaped with the emergence of digital technologies, I must confess I was sceptical. When people who do things that you like start writing about those things, it is not always a pretty picture. Or an easy read. However, like all sceptics, I am only a romantic waiting to be validated. So, when I picked up The New Digital Age I was hoping to be entertained, informed and shaken out of my socks as the gurus of the interwebz spin science fiction futures for our times. Sadly, I have been taught my lesson and have slid back into hardened scepticism.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Here is the short version of the book: Technology is good. Technology is going to be exciting. There are loads of people who haven't had it yet. There are not enough people who have figured out how things work. Everybody needs to go online because no matter what, technologies are here to stay and they are going to be the biggest corpus of power. They write, "There is a canyon dividing people who understand technology and people charged with addressing the world's toughest geopolitical issues, and no one has built a bridge…As global connectivity continues its unprecedented advance, many old institutions and hierarchies will have to adapt or risk becoming obsolete, irrelevant to modern society." So the handful who hold the reigns of the digital (states, corporates, artificial intelligence clusters) are either going to rule the world, or, well, write books about it.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The long version is slightly more nuanced, even though it fails to give us what we have grown to expect of all things Google — the bleeding edge of back and beyond. For a lay person, observations that Schmidt and Cohen make about the future of the digital age might be mildly interesting in the way title credits to your favourite movie can be. Once they have convinced us, many, many times, that the internet is fast and fluid and that it makes things fast and fluid and hence the future we imagine is going to be fast and fluid, the authors tell us that the internet is spawning a new "caste system" of haves, have-nots, and wants-but-does-not-haves.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Citing the internet as "the largest experiment involving anarchy in history" they look at the new negotiations of power around the digital. Virulent viruses from the "Middle East" make their appearance. Predictably wars of censorship and free information in China get due attention. Telcos get a big hand for building the infrastructure which can sell Google phones to people in Somalia. The book offers a straightforward (read military) reading of drones and less-than-expected biased views on cyberterrorism, which at least escapes the jingoism that the USA has been passing off in the service of a surveillance state. And more than anything else, the book shows politicos and governments around the world, that the future is messy, anarchy is at hand, but as long as they put their trust in Big Internet Brothers, the world will be a manageable place.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">So while you can clearly see where my review for the book is heading, I must give it its due credit.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There are three things about this book that make it interesting. The first is how Schmidt and Cohen seem to be in a seesaw dialogue with themselves. They realise that five billion people are going to get connected online. They gush a little about what this net-universality is going to mean. And then immediately, they also realise that we have to prepare ourselves for a "Brave New World," which is going to be infinitely more messy and scary. They recognise that the days of anonymity on the Web are gone, with real life identities becoming our primary digital avatars. However, they also hint at a potential future of pseudonymity that propels free speech in countries with authoritarian regimes. This oscillation between the good, the bad, the plain and the incredible, keeps their writing grounded without erring too much either on the side of techno-euphoria or dystopic visions of the future.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Second, and perhaps justly so, the book doles out a lot of useful information not just for the techno-neophytes but also the amateur savant. There are stories about "Currygate" in Singapore, or of what Vodaphone did in Egypt after the Arab Spring, or of the "Human Flesh Search Engine" in China, which offer a comprehensive, if not critical, view of the way things are. Schmidt and Cohen have been everywhere on the ether and they have cyberjockeyed for decades to tell us stories that might be familiar but are still worth the effort of writing.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Third, it is a readable book. It doesn't require you to Telnet your way into obscure meaning sets in the history of computing. It is written for people who are still mystified not only about the past of the Net but also its future, and treads a surprisingly balanced ground in both directions. It is a book you can give to your grandmother, and she might be inspired to get herself a Facebook (or maybe a Google +) account.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">But all said and done, I expected more. It is almost as if Schmidt and Cohen are sitting on a minefield of ideas which they want to hint at but don't yet want to share because they might be able to turn it into a new app for the Nexus instead. It is a book that could have been. It wasn't. It is ironic how silent the book is about the role that big corporations play in shaping our techno-futures, and the fact that it is printed on dead-tree books with closed licensing so I couldn't get a free copy online. For people claiming to build new and political futures, the fact that this wisdom could not come out in more accessible forms and formats, speaks a lot about how seriously we can take their views of the future.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-june-14-2013-nishant-shah-world-wide-rule'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-june-14-2013-nishant-shah-world-wide-rule</a>
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No publishernishantInternet Governance2013-07-01T10:26:24ZBlog EntryThe Stranger with Candy
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/indian-express-june-16-2013-nishant-shah-the-stranger-with-candy
<b>Beware of online threats, as the distinction between friends and foes is false on the internet. </b>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">Nishant Shah's column was <a class="external-link" href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/the-stranger-with-candy/1129446/0">published in the Indian Express</a> on June 16, 2013.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">My parents and I were in Oslo, when after a long day in the city, we returned to an intriguing situation. My father, who is quite a digital migrant and uses the internet for daily exchanges, found an email from an uncle waiting in his inbox. The email begins with the uncle travelling to Madrid, Spain, to help an ailing cousin who needs a surgery and requested that my father help the writer, his cousin, with €2,500. The email ended with a note of urgency, "I will check my email every 30 minutes for your reply".</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">My father, who was by now rather agitated, asked my brother and me what could be done. People asking for money over email is the modern day equivalent of strangers bearing candy in a car. We were both immediately wary and when we saw the mail, we knew that it was a scam. Somebody had cracked into somebody's account and was now sending out emails to everybody in their contact list, hoping to make a quick buck. The only action we took was to inform the relative that his account seemed to have been compromised and that he needed to protect it.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This incident, in the context of disallowing children below 13 years on Facebook in India, got me thinking. How do we trust somebody, or something online? There is a presumption that digital natives instinctively know how to deal with dubious situations online. True, one seldom hears of a digital native falling for scams of Nigerian princes offering their inheritance or widows of bank managers in Saudi Arabia wanting to transfer millions to their bank accounts. But that might be because digital natives live more in gift and attention economies and have always been suspicious of anybody waving a wad of notes.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">However, we do know that the young are often susceptible to other predators on the Web. While it might occasionally seem that the West's paranoia around paedophiles online, preying on young children as sexual victims might have reached the limits of logical absurdity, it remains indisputable that young adults haven't yet developed the codes to trust somebody online. We encounter countless stories of the young who endanger their futures by documenting their follies and foibles in the unforgiving and unforgetting space of the internet. Let us not forget the names of Adnan Patrawala and Koushambi Layek, who fell prey to strangers pretending to be friends and lovers on the social networking site Orkut.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">I am not suggesting that the World Wide Web is any more dangerous than the brick and mortar world that we live in. Our flesh- and-bone bodies are under equal danger in our everyday lives. But over time, we have learned and have been taught how to decode conditions that might harm us. We have learned to distance ourselves from strangers with grins, and people who look hostile. The authorities have created visible signposts of danger all around us — from red traffic lights to surveillance cameras — that constantly remind us that safety is not the default mode of our existence but something that we need to incessantly create for ourselves.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The digital world has no such guidelines. The mammoth corporations, which now govern a large part of the cyberspace, individually try to create structures that would save us from falling victim to such attacks. So the filter on your Gmail account is an intelligent system that scans every byte of information that goes in and out of your inbox, learning both your behaviour patterns and your interaction modes, to filter out not only the obvious hoax emails but also things that you might deem as clutter. Smart browsers like Firefox identify IP addresses that are regularly abusive and warn us about installing any software that might originate there. On Facebook, certain pictures and posts with offensive content are censored even before they get into your data stream. The friendship algorithm, further ensures that you increasingly see content from your 'close friends' rather than strangers. In all these mechanisms, which use big data mining tools to recognise harmful patterns as well as encourage you to devise your own vouchsafes, there is an implicit understanding that the people we know will do us less harm. They are designed to keep out unwanted or potentially harmful people because it might lead to danger or conflict.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">However, as we saw in the case of the email to my father, the distinctions between strangers and friends on the internet, is a forced one. When all digital avatars are a performance of a kind, it becomes easy for an imposter to take on that identity. The only credentials we have of somebody's authenticity are often their user accounts and email — data which can be stolen and manipulated effortlessly. And increasingly, we have learned that when it comes to the online world, the people who infect us with viruses, rob us of our money and crash our digital worlds are people who are our 'friends'.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">While we shall learn through experience and through stories, there remains a need to develop a larger social discussion around trust online. This debate cannot be whether content needs to be censored online or whether certain groups should be allowed to get on to social network systems. Instead, it has to be a debate that realises the notions of friendship and trust, of networks and connections, are not merely extensions of the physical into the digital. On the infobahn, these are new modes of operation and being and it is not going to be easy to create a handbook of online safety. What we will need is an involved and inter-generational debate about the social, political and economic safety online and create signposts that remind us of the dangers of being online.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/indian-express-june-16-2013-nishant-shah-the-stranger-with-candy'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/indian-express-june-16-2013-nishant-shah-the-stranger-with-candy</a>
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No publishernishantResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-04-17T11:00:04ZBlog EntryWhose Change is it Anyway?
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/hivos-knowledge-programme-june-14-2013-nishant-shah-whose-change-is-it-anyway
<b>This thought piece is an attempt to reflect critically on existing practices of “making change” and its implications for the future of citizen action in information and network societies. It observes that change is constantly and explicitly invoked at different stages in research, practice, and policy in relation to digital technologies, citizen action, and network societies. </b>
<p>The White Paper by Nishant Shah was <a class="external-link" href="http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/Civic-Explorations/Publications/Whose-Change-is-it-anyway">published by Hivos recently</a>.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">However, we do not have adequate frameworks to address the idea of change. What constitutes change? What are the intentions that make change possible? Who are the actors involved? Whose change is it, anyway?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Drawing on the Hivos Knowledge Programme and on knowledge frameworks around youth, technology, and change from the last four years, this thought piece introduces new ways of defining, locating, and figuring change. In the process, it also helps understand the role that digital technologies play in shaping and amplifying our processes and practices of change, and to understand actors of change who are not necessarily confined to the category of “citizen”, which seems to be understood as the de facto agent of change in contemporary social upheavals, political uprisings, and cultural innovations.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Methodologically, this thought piece attempts to make three discursive interventions: It locates digital activism in historical trajectories, positing that digital activism has deep ties to traditional activism, when it comes to the core political cause. Simultaneously, it recognises that new modes of political engagement are demanding and producing novel practices and introducing new actors and stakeholders. It looks at contemporary digital and network theories, but also draws on older philosophical lineages to discuss the crises that we seek to address. It tries to interject these abstractions and theoretical frameworks back into the field by producing two case studies that show how engagement with these questions might help us reflect critically on our past practices and knowledge as well as on visions for and speculations about the future, and how these shape contemporary network societies. It builds a theoretical framework based on knowledge gleaned from conversations, interviews, and on-the-ground action with different groups and communities in emerging information societies, and integrates with new critical theory to build an interdisciplinary and accessible framework that seeks to inform research, development-based interventions, and policy structures at the intersection of digital technologies, citizen action, and change by introducing questions around change into existing discourse.</p>
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<p><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/whose-change-is-it-anyway.pdf" class="internal-link">Click to download the full White Paper here</a> (PDF, 321 Kb)</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/hivos-knowledge-programme-june-14-2013-nishant-shah-whose-change-is-it-anyway'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/hivos-knowledge-programme-june-14-2013-nishant-shah-whose-change-is-it-anyway</a>
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No publishernishantDigital ActivismRAW PublicationsDigital NativesYouthFeaturedPublicationsHomepage2015-04-17T10:56:47ZBlog Entry It’s Common Practice
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/indian-express-may-12-2013-nishant-shah-its-common-practice
<b>Technologies are no longer abstract. They're habits. What constitutes a habit? The gestures that you make as you read this, the way your eyes flick when you encounter somebody you like, the way you stroke your chin in a moment of reflection, or the split second decisions that you make in times of crises — these are all habits. They are pre-thought, visceral, depending upon biological, social and collective memories that do not need rational thinking. Habits are the customised programming of human life. </b>
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<p>Nishant Shah's column was <a class="external-link" href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/it-s-common-practice/1113490/0">published in the Indian Express</a> on May 12, 2013.</p>
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<p>However, habits are not natural. They are, in fact, man-made nature. They appear as natural, matter-of-fact, instinctive and intuitive, but they are built over years of shared experiences, learning and empathy. And more often than we realise, habits are formed because of the different technologies that surround us.</p>
<p>If you are reading this column on paper, look at the way you are holding the magazine, folding the paper and note how you can read this easily because the text has been arranged from left to right, top to bottom. If you are browsing through this piece on a digital device, look at how your fingers move on your scroll button, or on your touchscreen, helping you make sense of complex devices without a second thought.</p>
<p>Habits that are formed through technologies work so seamlessly because they make technologies transparent. They make us forget that there is a complex network of machines, devices, grids and information that shape our lives. Do you remember the time when you came across something online and didn't look for the 'Like' button that is now a part of everyday internet practice? Do you remember the last time you struggled to manage the cursor on your screen using a mouse? Do you realise how the mouse has already become obsolete and is now being replaced by other touch-and-flick devices for a new generation?</p>
<p>I recently encountered this habit when my three-going-on-90-year-old Kindle — the Amazon device I use to read books — fell in the hands of a six-year-old. Like many digital natives of her time, she is unfazed by technology and, as her parents confess, is much better at operating most things digital in the house than them. She thinks nothing of streaming her favourite cartoon show from a website. She is adept at customising the many screens on her father's smartphone and has accepted that specific movements of her fingers will produce information on brightly-lit touchscreens.</p>
<p>However, when she used my non-backlit, non-touch Kindle that requires buttons to be pushed, she faced acute frustration. After trying to scroll, flick, activate, zoom and pinch on the screen she flung it at me, bewildered and angry that her habits were suddenly redundant and challenged. I want to use this moment of reflection to understand how technologies are integral to our ways of living. Technologies are habits. You don't need to be online 24x7, constantly upgrading yourself to the latest version of Android to interact with technology. Instead, we need to think about technologies as outlets that allow us to think about who we are and how we relate to the world around us.</p>
<p>One way of looking at technology as habits is to see how we have started thinking of ourselves through metaphors of the machines that we use. For example, it's quite common to hear people complain about "lack of bandwidth" to describe busy schedules. We now think of ourselves as systems that need upgrading. Life has long been lived on windows through which we recycle ourselves.</p>
<p>If technologies are such an inseparable part of ourselves, maybe it is time to stop making a distinction between the human and the technological. It is time to stop thinking about technologies only in terms of gadgets that can be removed from our biological assemblage. And indeed, if we are ready to recognise these technologies as a part of being human, then we need to think of technology politics in a new way. The questions around piracy, privacy, intellectual property, proprietary technologies, openness, etc. which are relegated to the digital world are also questions of us. They are not external problems but are centrally shaping how we construct ourselves as humans. Through habits.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/indian-express-may-12-2013-nishant-shah-its-common-practice'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/indian-express-may-12-2013-nishant-shah-its-common-practice</a>
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No publishernishantDigital subjectivitiesCyberculturesResearchers at Work2015-04-24T11:41:47ZBlog EntryDigital Native: Web of Wander
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-may-20-2018-digital-native-web-of-wander
<b>The idea of travel as a way of expanding our horizon has now been made redundant.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article was published in the <a class="external-link" href="http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-technology/digital-native-web-of-wander-5183090/">Indian Express</a> on May 20, 2018.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">The promise of connected digital networks — that which we now call the internet — was to replace space with time, as the unit of our life. Space has been critical in thinking of our units of a private, personal, social, collective and political organisation. Space had defined our notions of friendship, intimacy, family, society, and sociality. It seemed like a preposterous idea at that time, about four decades ago, to imagine that space would become less relevant in configuring our sense of who we are and how we relate to the world. In the early days of the internet, when people were still working on clunky connections and text-based interfaces, this idea of proximity being replaced by temporality, was relegated to the realms of sci-fi fantasy.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Now, our friends are not defined by proximity but through <a href="http://indianexpress.com/about/facebook/">Facebook</a> algorithms. We have come to learn that we might have more in common with a person halfway across the globe than with somebody who might be living next door. We think of global news as local news, consuming faraway information in real time, and being invested in the politics of spaces we have never visited. In IT-service countries like India, entire shadow cities have been built where people define their working times, rhythms, and, even their names, based on the distant geographies they work in — even when located in the back-processing offices in Bengaluru, Gurugram, and Hyderabad. We have started thinking of information as streams of time, and, increasingly, our digital practices have been space independent as we move our life to the cloud.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">And yet, we remain enslaved to the geographies of our living and the materiality of our devices. Somebody might be just a click away, but they are also not always available because of the distances in space. Information might be easily available and ready to stream, but without the context of other people sharing and making meaning of it, there might be no relevance or urgency to it. We might lose ourselves in online role-playing games and immerse in social media conversation that makes us forget where we are. But none of it has actually made space irrelevant. If anything, as we become informationally overloaded subjects, and continue to invest all our time on digital screens, space has become a premium and travel has taken on new connotations.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Once upon a time, when people talked about travel, it was a journey towards something — to discover new people, cultures, rhythms of life and ways of living. Travel carried with it a sense of purpose: to find more, learn more, explore more and enrich our lives with the experiences of diversity that the world holds for us. The presumption was that we live small and sheltered lives, and travel gifts us new horizons. This idea of travel has now been made redundant for the contemporary information subjects. At the speed of a click, we now have access to information of the world, often in real time, in ways that we could never have imagined. Our cultural references are global, our cuisine, too, is multicultural. We talk of shows and communities that are global. Travel is now just another data stream that adds to this milieu of the informationally overloaded subject.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The digital does not change travel. It does not make travel unnecessary. It doesn’t shrink the world or make it flatter. Instead, because it gives us access to the world already, it makes us ask questions of why we travel and what do we get out of it. The digital access through augmented reality, through virtual reality, through immersive media, and through connected networks, helps us ask a question again of why we travel, and subsequently, what we travel for and what we travel to. Digital travels are travels with an intention, with a purpose, and with a responsibility that makes it necessary for us to connect with the local in a new way. The digital platforms for travel – from Couchsurfing to Wikitravels, from augmented maps to TripAdvisor discussion boards — are a way of showing us the alternative that is no longer the expected brief. They are ways of finding communities, of ethical engagements and new modes of interaction where we take other roles than just being tourists, and become new subjects of critical discovery and exploring horizons with a purpose.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-may-20-2018-digital-native-web-of-wander'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-may-20-2018-digital-native-web-of-wander</a>
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No publishernishantResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2018-06-01T00:04:51ZBlog EntryOf Jesters, Clowns and Pranksters: YouTube and the Condition of Collaborative Authorship
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/jesters-clowns-pranksters
<b>The idea of a single author creating cinematic objects in a well-controlled scheme of support system and production/distribution infrastructure has been fundamentally challenged by the emergence of digital video sharing sites like YouTube, writes Nishant Shah in this peer reviewed essay published in the Journal of Moving Images, Number 8, December 2009.</b>
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<p>The idea of the single author creating cinematic objects in a well-controlled scheme of support system and production/distribution infrastructure has been fundamentally challenged by the emergence of digital video sharing sites like YouTube. The recent state of controversies around YouTube, has foregrounded the question of authorship in collaborative conditions. Questions of who owns the particular videos and what is the role that the large communities of authorship play have not been resolved as the debaters have concentrated only on single videos and singular notions of authorship, dismissing the (this paper proposes) collaborators as jesters, clowns and pranksters, without recognizing their contribution to the videos.</p>
<h3>Introduction</h3>
<p>I shall begin by misquoting and possibly violating copyright regimes by invoking Dostoyevsky, to say that all dissimilar technologies are the same in their own way, but all similar technologies are uniquely different. Every technological innovation, but particularly innovations affecting authorship and the role of the author, brings with it a new set of anxieties and concerns. David Stewart, in his engrossing book on the history of technology and communication, for example, talks about how in the early years of postal service there were debates around who was the author of the mail that was being delivered. Through a particularly fascinating case that looked at a Lord in London holding the post office responsible for some objectionable mail delivered to his daughter, Stewart traces the origins of techno-neutrality and regulation to look upon technology as merely a bearer of knowledge – in this case, the mail – and the original author, this primordial figure that sits and writes or shoots or sings, as the only person upon whom the responsibility and hence also the credit can be placed.</p>
<p>Mark Joffe, in his movie The Man Who Sued God, introduces us to the case of Steve Myers, an ex-lawyer in Australia, who sues God because his boat is struck by lightning and his insurance company refuses to pay, claiming it to be an act of God. By claiming to be God’s representatives on Earth, the Christian churches and the Jewish synagogues are held to be the liable party, putting them in the difficult position of either having to pay out large sums of money, or prove that God does not exist. But more than anything else, it is the attribution of responsibility to one particular, identifiable entity that lies at the centre of the movie. Even in the pre-Internet world, one of the biggest sources of anxieties has been determining authorship and putting into place a knowledge apparatus that reinforces the need for such a condition. The question of authorship, while it surfaces in a number of contexts – copyright infringements, intellectual property right regimes, plagiarism, crediting and referencing industries, etc – is perhaps most interestingly manifest on video sharing social networking sites like YouTube and Myspace.</p>
<p>Rather than addressing what constitutes digital cinema or the future of celluloid, I would instead like to locate the emergence of the idea of authorship, through a historical examination of an ‘old media’. I will be looking at the early history of the book and the print revolution to argue that the condition of authorship that one presumes for the book, and subsequently, through a different trajectory, for cinema, is not something that was inherent to it; and in fact the early history of the book is filled with conflicts around the question of how you could attribute the book as an artefact to one individual author. By examining the conditions that enabled the establishment of the book as a stable object that can be linked to the author, I hope to return us to a different way of thinking about Youtube videos and the debates on authorship that surround it.</p>
<h3>YouTube and the question of authorship</h3>
<p>The world of YouTube stakeholders can roughly be divided into two camps: People who swear by it and people who swear at it. The camp has arisen mainly because of differences of opinions on who owns a YouTube video and the content therein. The critics of YouTube – largely recording companies and movie studios and distributors – argue that platforms like YouTube are killing their businesses, emptying their coffers, and are a direct threat to the sacred cow of all cultural productions – the livelihood and the integrity of the creative artist. They make claims that a site like YouTube infringes the copyright regimes because videos get published by somebody who has ripped it from another source, and often does no crediting. Also, that the sales of the music or the movies or television serials go down because of such activities.</p>
<p>One of the most recent infamous example that can be cited is the case of the Let’s Go Crazy Dancing video case, were the world literally went crazy. In early February 2007, Stephanie Lenz’s 13-month-old son started dancing. Pushing a walker across her kitchen floor, Holden Lenz started moving to the distinctive beat of a song by Prince, “Let’s Go Crazy.” <a href="#fn1" name="fr1">[1]</a> Lenz wanted her mother to see the film so she did what any citizen of the 21st century would do: She uploaded the file to YouTube and sent her relatives and friends the link. They watched the video scores of times. It was a perfect YouTube moment: a community of laughs around a homemade video, readily shared with anyone who wanted to watch.</p>
<p>Sometime over the next four months, however, someone from Universal Music Group also watched Holden dance. Universal manages the copyrights of Prince. It fired off a letter to YouTube demanding that it remove the unauthorized “performance” of Prince’s music. YouTube, to avoid liability itself, complied. YouTube sent Lenz a notice that it was removing her video. She wondered, “Why?” What had she done wrong? Her questions reached the Electronic Frontier Foundation and then started the battle, where on Lenz’s behalf, the EFF lawyers sent a ‘counter-notice’ to YouTube, that no rights of Universal were violated by Holden’s dancing video. Lenz as the author of the video was concentrating on her son’s dancing and that the presence of Prince’s song was negligible and definitely fair use. Yet Universal’s lawyers insist to this day that sharing this home movie is wilful copyright infringement under the laws of the United States. On their view of the law, she is liable to a fine of up to $150,000 for sharing 29 seconds of Holden dancing. They specifically state that Lenz is not the ‘original’ artist who made the music and thus she is appropriating authorship and violating the rights of the artist – Prince, to be identified as the creator of the song. The notice also informed her that they were unhappy with the ‘clowning’ around of Prince’s music which might offend his fan-base.</p>
<p>The questions which come to the fore are very obvious and not new to the history of legal debates on cinema: What is the content of the video? Who is the author of the video? Who watches the video? What are the intentions of the video? The supporters of the ‘Free as in Beer’ access movements and also of YouTube clearly point out the farcical condition of this battle. As Lawrence Lessig very eloquently points out in his essay on the ‘Defence of Piracy’.</p>
<p>How is it that sensible people, people no doubt educated at some of the best universities and law schools in the country, would come to think it a sane use of corporate resources to threaten the mother of a dancing 13-month-old? What is it that allows these lawyers and executives to take a case like this seriously, to believe there’s some important social or corporate reason to deploy the federal scheme of regulation called copyright to stop the spread of these images and music? “Let’s Go Crazy” indeed!<a href="#fn2" name="fr2">[2]</a></p>
<p>In another instance, which is a competition on YouTube between two videos to reach the coveted “first video to be seen 1 million times” status, brings again these question of the author and the pranksters. Avril Lavigne fans, on the release of her recent Single ‘Girlfriend’, started campaigning to make that video the first to be viewed 1 million times on YouTube. They put it in direct competition with the then most viewed video – ‘History of Dance’ – and started activities that violated the Terms of Service for YouTube. They embedded the videos in many sites and started websites which played the videos automatically. They even created a website which auto reloaded the video every fifteen minutes and encouraged fans to keep the website opened, abusing the power of broad band, while they are browsing, surfing, or even sleeping. The efforts paid off and Avril Lavigne’s ‘Girlfriend’, in July 2008, became the first video to be watched 1 million times in the history of YouTube. One would have thought that such publicity is what a distributor’s wet dreams are made of. However, just after the video reached the 1 million mark and entered the heights of popularity, YouTube received a notice from Times Warner, to remove the video because it was a copyright violation. They also demanded that all the other compilations and samplings which included the song be removed from YouTube. The supporters of the move, condemned the Lavigne fans as ‘pranksters’ or ‘jesters’ who were in for the cheap publicity, because they were not really creators of the video or the authors. In a startling Op-Ed titled ‘How Avril Lavigne Killed YouTube’ in the New York Times, a spokesperson for Times Warner suggested.</p>
<p>This is not respectable fan behaviour. A fan is somebody who loves and worships the author and not somebody who pretends to be the author. The avrilelavignebandaid group just turned out to be a group of pirates who passed off Lavigne’s video as their own and went on to promote it, forgetting the fact that they were using a democratic platform like YouTube for activities which can only be called theft!</p>
<p>Predictably, the debate on the question of authorship takes place in a rather somber tone, whether it is the zealous claims of monopoly of production and authorship that the established industries claim for themselves, or the passionate defenses of the YouTubeians. What remains constant through the entire process is the fact that the idea of a singular, identifiable author remains stable and unchallenged. I would like to take a slightly different track here, and try and see how we can think the question of the “production of the author” by revisiting the history of the book and of early print culture, and look at the manner in which the idea of the author emerges.</p>
<p>There is often an unstated assumption about the book as authored by a single person and authorship is spoken of in a value-neutral and ahistorical manner. It would be useful to situate the condition of authorship within a historical moment, where authorship is not seen to be an apriori condition but a constructed one, and one whose history is located in specific technological changes. The technology of print and paper brought about a set of questions around the question of authorship, and in the same way, the domain of Internet video sharing and collaborative authorship raises a set of questions and concerns.</p>
<h3>The construction of author/ity</h3>
<p>In many ways, the debate on authorship and knowledge is similar to the older debate in philosophy between body and self. Critics of self, such as Foucault, demonstrate that the notion of the self has often stemmed from very particular experiences in the Christian West, which were then posited as universal experiences. However, doing away with the notion of the self does not do away with the question of the body. In fact, Foucault goes on to explore the technologies of the self and how it informs our understanding of the body. In a similar vein, while the proponents of the Web 2.0 revolution (sometimes unknown to themselves, echoing debates that happened in print about a 100 years ago) announce either the death of the author or the availability of open licensing, fail to recognize that the question of authorship (and hence authority) are rooted both in particular practices as well as in technological forms. Hence the debates take familiar shapes: author versus pirate, digital versus celluloid, collaborative versus single author, etc.</p>
<p>It is especially when posing the question of authorship in absolute terms that the cultural producers/consumers on YouTube get reduced to pranksters, jesters or clowns. The debate also excludes the temporal framework of the debate and forget that the Internet is still a work in progress. Even though an Internet year is akin to seven pre-digital years, and time is now experienced in accelerated modes, it is necessary to realize that the domain of collaborative online sharing and production of videos is a relatively new one.</p>
<p>It may be more useful to think of the post-celluloid world as an extremely ambiguous and fluid period, undoubtedly marked by immense possibilities, but we have not reached any settled phase yet. So if we are to make comparisons, then it is more useful to compare the contemporary period with another moment in history, and the emergence of a cultural form other than cinema, which was marked by an equal fluidity. It is here that I go to the early history of print culture or ‘print in the making’<a href="#fn3" name="fr3">[3]</a> and the conflicts over the question of authorship, to demonstrate that the condition of authorship question is an important one, but it is not a question that is unique to YouTube or the Internet. And an examination of the conditions under which authorship came to be established may help us get over our anxieties about authorship, and better understand it with certain lightness – through pranks, jests and clowning around.</p>
<h3>What’s in a name? – The author and the book</h3>
<p>For us to understand the idea of print in the making, we need to understand some of the practices that preceded the idea of print. They also enable us to understand the specific nature of the disputes around the question of authorship, and more importantly rethink disputes over authorship as productive disputes. Lawrence Liang in his ‘A brief history of the Internet in 13th and 14th Century’ takes up the example of Chaucer, the father of English poetry. He demonstrates, through different readings, “how the structure and the form of the Canterbury Tales reflects, interestingly, the question of approaches to the idea of authorship as well as the conditions of the production of the Canterbury Tales itself.” Liang looks at the manuscript cultures and the ways in which authorship and rights were understood.</p>
<p>Borrowing from Mark Rose, Liang shows how, in the Middle Ages, the owner of a manuscript was understood to possess the right to grant permission to copy it, and this was a right that could be exploited, as it was, for example, by those monasteries that regularly charged a fee for permission to copy one of their books. This was somewhat similar to copyright royalty with the crucial difference that the book-owner’s property was not a right in the text as such but in the manuscript as a physical object made of ink and parchment. The value provided by the monastery and the reason for their charging for their copy fee did not emerge just from the existence of the copy alone, but also from the fact that each monastery also had their unique elements in the form of the annotations, the commentary, corrections, which only the particular monastery’s copy might contain. The very act of copying and possession made you the author of that text and also the owner of the book.<a href="#fn4" name="fr4">[4]</a> The author was not only the reclusive solitary figure that coins the first word but the various scribes, writers, annotators and litterateurs who offered changes, as well as helped in distribution and copying.<a href="#fn5" name="fr5">[5]</a></p>
<p>So, while the popular account of preprint cultures is of slavish copying by scribes, the story turns out to be slightly more complicated. Acting as annotators, compilers, and correctors, medieval book owners and scribes actively shaped the texts they read. For example, they might choose to leave out some of the Canterbury Tales, or contribute one of their own. They might correct Chaucer’s versification every now and then. They might produce whole new drafts of Chaucer by combining one or more of his published versions with others. And these were all legitimate, acceptable and engaged forms of authorship. While this activity of average or amateur readers differs in scale and quality from Chaucer’s work, it opens us to new questions of the relationship between author, text, and reader in the Middle Ages, and also what it may mean to understand contemporary practices of knowledge and cultural creation.</p>
<p>Scribes and readers responded to Chaucer, Langland, and others, not by slavishly copying, canonizing, or passively receiving their texts, but by reworking them as creative readers. In doing so, they continue and contribute to the great layers of intertextual conversation that made the work of these now canonical authors relevant, interesting, and, fundamentally, possible. Similar debates surround the attribution of authorship to William Shakespeare for his work. Literary historians have periodically made claims that Shakespeare’s plays were written by the then court poet Ben Jonson, that Shakespeare’s plays were written by Christopher Marlowe, who is considered to be his arch enemy, that Shakespeare’s plays were written by another man named Shakespeare, and not the Shakespeare we think we know. At the basis of these arguments was the idea that the plays were designed not to be written but be performed and that in the lively rendering of the play, between different actors and producers, the original text changed. Interestingly, the Shakespearean technique of ‘asides’ and ‘taking the audience into confidence’ was actually a way of inviting the audience to not only receive the story but to read it differently, and edit it with their response to it.</p>
<p>This invitation was accepted by late Elizabethans who took great pleasure in seeing the same play multiple times to see how it has changed in the performance. Moreover, as multiple copies of the same manuscript started appearing in the living public, along with the actors and the producers, the readers also took great pleasure in creating copies of the takes that drastically cut, expand, edit and otherwise Shakespeare’s plays.<a href="#fn6" name="fr1">[6]</a></p>
<p>This activity goes beyond the mechanics of audience reception and looks at the plays as a collaborative effort which gets glossed over in the making of the authoritative folios which looked upon all such interventions as anomalies to the text. Before the fixity of text, there was a possibility to think of the text not as a finished product but a work in progress that elicits new responses, meanings and forms through its engagement with the audience. Moreover, the audience, in their rights of consumption, also seemed to possess the right to edit, change and circulate the text. They were the original jesters, pranksters and clowns, who, in their playful response to the text, constructed it to respond to their contexts and traditions. This sounds a lot like the debates we are experiencing on YouTube videos where the readers respond in kind to the poetics of reading and composing within which the YouTube videos operate.</p>
<h3>Conclusion</h3>
<p>Thus rather than speaking about authorship as something that is intrinsic to either a particular mode of authorship or intrinsic to any technological form, it might be more useful instead to consider the variety of knowledge apparatuses which come into play to establish its authority. In the case for the history of the book, it was clear that the establishment of authorship depended on the arrangements, classifications and kinds of assemblage that make it possible, maintain it as well as critique it. The conventions, for instance, by which the title and author of a work are identified play very specific functions in preparing for knowledge, as do the several kinds of documentation, attribution, citation and copyright.</p>
<p>The preconditions for authorship cannot easily be made into the object that we identify as author. It is a matter of making evident (making known) the structures of authorship which emerge in ways that provide definitive proof of the imperfectability and ambiguity of the authorial position. To speak of the productive nature of conflicts over authorship is then to recognize that any author – either exalted or dismissed - is constructed in a condition of potential collaboration and revision. The question thus centres on how we use the notion of authorship, how we bring it to light and mobilize it today to understand cultural forms differently. The way the authorship debates take place, there is almost a theological devotion to an exalted idea of author, without a consideration of the apparatus that was established to construct that condition.</p>
<p>The point is not to do away with the question of the author or construct another catch-all retainer that accepts all forms of engagement as authorship, but to recognize it not as something that is intrinsic or a given but something that is always transient, and to locate it, in the case of digital cinema, within specific practices and technologies. To return to the question of YouTube videos and the future of celluloid image; we are now faced with new questions about authorship and the very form that the digital cinema embodies: If the image itself is no longer made to bear the burden of meaning and intention, can we locate new forms of authorship – sometimes in incidental intertextuality, sometimes in creating conditions (as is in the case of DVDs or digital video sharing sites) narratives, meanings, interpretations and paraphernalia that simultaneously re-emphasize the sacredness of the image while deconstructing the apparatus that establishes a fixity of authorship over that image? Can we look at not only novel forms of interaction and consumption of the celluloid image but at a playful engagement with the image to create a galaxy of responses – sometimes as reciprocal videos, often through comments, embedding mechanisms, using the video not as an object unto itself but as a form of complex referencing and citation to a larger community of artists and authors?</p>
<p>The future of celluloid, especially if we are locating it in the realm of the Digital Moving Objects of Web 2.0 technologies, is going to have debates which were relevant also to the making of the book. However, this is not to say that the challenges faced and the problematic that emerge are redundant. Indeed, the celluloid frame and its overpowering capacity to incorporate technology, content, response and remixes, to produce the spectacle of watching, posit certain challenges to the Web 2.0 celebrations while simultaneously expanding its own scope of production. YouTube debates around infantile abuse of video/cinema technologies to make dancing babies and furry animals popular need to be read as symptomatic of a much larger question of authorship, authority and the conditions of cultural production rather than signalling the death of celluloid. An escape from the authority question also allows for an escape from the celluloid-digital binary and posits a more fruitful engagement in looking at how celluloid technologies (and the constellation of factors therewith) inform our understanding and analysis of the DMIs that are slowly gaining popularity.</p>
<p>This research was originally published in the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.jmionline.org/jmi8_4.htm">Journal of Moving Images</a>.</p>
<p>See the research paper in <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.academia.edu/NishantShah/Papers">Academia.edu</a>.</p>
<hr />
</div>
<h3>References</h3>
<div>
<p>[<a href="#fr1" name="fn1">1</a>].Holden Lenz’s YouTube debut, that probably made him the most popular baby on the Internet is still available for viewing at <<a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/internet-governance/Holden%20Lenz%E2%80%99s%20YouTube%20debut,%20that%20probably%20made%20him%20the%20most%20popular%20baby%20on%20the%20Internet%20is%20still%20available%20for%20viewing%20at%20%3Chttp:/www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1KfJHFWlhQ%3E%20retrieved%2012:14%20a.m.%2022nd%20January%202010." class="external-link">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1KfJHFWlhQ</a>> retrieved 12:14 a.m. 22nd January 2010.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr2" name="fn2">2</a>].The essay is available for open access at <<a class="external-link" href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122367645363324303.html">http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122367645363324303.html</a>></p>
<p>[<a href="#fr3" name="fn3">3</a>].I am grateful to Lawrence Liang for this methodological framework where he looks at the emergence of Wikipedia and the pre-print cultures, to look at the similarities and differences between the two. “A Brief History of the Internet in the 13th and 14th Century”. Forthcoming 2010.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr4" name="fn4">4</a>].See Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading. 1990. New York: Penguin Books.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr5" name="fn5">5</a>].Daniel Wolf, in Reading History in Early Modern England. 2005. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, explains in great detail how the reader as well as the author were imagined, constructed and recognized in the early days of print.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr6" name="fn6">6</a>].See Molly Abel Travis’s comprehensive account of the debates in Construction of Readers in the Twentieth Century. 1998. Illinois, Chicago: Southern Illinois University Press.</p>
</div>
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No publishernishantIntellectual Property RightsCopyright2012-12-14T10:24:05ZBlog EntryPeople
http://editors.cis-india.org/about/people/people
<b>The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) brings together a range of people with backgrounds in various disciplines who have made significant interventions and impacts in the newly emerging area of Internet and Society. Functioning through a model of collaborations, consultations and peer-networking, our works feature some of the most innovative and relevant ideas embodied by the different people we work with. We also undertake research, advocacy, and educational programmes which involve an extensive network of researchers, practitioners, artists, and institutions partnering with us intellectually and programmatically.</b>
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<h4><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/about/people/board-and-society-members">Board and Society Members</a></h4>
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No publishernishant2020-08-04T05:52:57ZPageDigital Pluralism
http://editors.cis-india.org/about/substantive-areas/digital-pluralism/digital-pluralism-1
<b></b>
<p align="justify">The Internet,
when referred to with a capital I, often gives the notion of a
centralised, homogenised, consolidated network of access, protocols
and people. Popular representations and imaginations of the Internet
‘make invisible’, the extremely complex, intricate, and varied
nature, not only of the uses and the stakeholders of the Internet but
also the many forms that Internet itself takes. The notion of
pluralism – the belief in multiple knowledges and perspectives, the
availability of different frameworks and truths, and the
transmit-ability and transmutability of information – is built into
the very form of the Internet. It is perhaps more appropriate, given
the wide scope and range of the internet and the many different ways
in which it intersects with the world around us, to talk of many
different kinds of internets.</p>
<p align="justify">The Centre
for Internet and Society sets out to examine the multiplicity of
Internet by looking at the notion of digital pluralism. We seek to
theorise the particular concept to investigate the many intersections
that the internet has with the world around us. Given the scope and
persuasiveness of internet technologies, it would be redundant to
produce a list of possible meanings of the internet. Instead, we
conceptualise the internet at three different levels, each demanding
its own history, context, materiality and specificities, to produce a
more comprehensive understanding of what the internet means and how
it responds and reacts to the digitised and networked times we live
in.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Internet
as Technology</h3>
<p align="justify">At the primary level, the Internet is a set of protocols, which allows the
transfer of data over a complex and almost interminable network. It
is necessary, as the internet increasingly becomes central to the
crucial mechanics of survival, to recognise it as a
technology. The arrival of internet technologies has made a
significant impact in the domains of life, labour, language and
history, changing the way we understand certain older structures like
property, economy, capital, possession, ownership, etc.</p>
<p align="justify">So persuasive
is the seductive power of the internet, that it often makes
invisible the larger questions of freedom, access, and production, in
its unfolding. The call to re-emphasise the internet as technology is
to examine the economic rhetoric of globalisation, urbanisation and
new digital technologies on the one hand, and the alarmist calls
around piracy, security, theft and ownership on the other.</p>
<p align="justify">Communities
of gift economy, of open access to content online, of advocating
Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS), of promoting greater
inclusion and pluralism of non-licensed softwares and protocols have
all emerged around the questions of Internet as Technology. Despite
the gravity of the concerns they raise and the unequivocal merit of
their activities, very little attention is given to them either by
the private sector or civil societies or the government. While
there has been a long (and often raging) debate on the internet
around these issues, the mainstream media and the larger public
remain outside its scope and continue getting implicated in
softwares, platforms and digital forms while compromising their
rights.</p>
<p align="justify">The Centre
for Internet and Society hopes, through a model of consultation and
collaboration, to actively intervene in this field, to promote the
digital pluralism of internet technologies and resist
any hegemonic and coercive practices of larger corporate conglomerates
and state bodies that may act against public interest.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Internet and
its Materiality</h3>
<p align="justify">The Internet
has material consequences. Cybercultures theory, augmented by other instrumental
discourses on the internet, incessantly confines cyberspaces to a schism between virtual reality and real life. Such a
view of the internet renders the material transactions and
consequences of the internet invisible.</p>
<p align="justify">As the internet technologies become more pervasive and persuasive, they
become an integral part of the mechanics of modern survival. The
internet has now become central to the domains of life, labour and
language, affecting crucial questions of identity,
subjectivity, sexuality, freedom and expression. How do we think of
ourselves, not only in relation to technology but also as
technologised beings; in a condition of becoming cyborgs? What are
the forms of subjectivities that emerge in the technologised
transactions of every day? How do we understand the different forms
of sexual interactions, mediated and shaped by internet technologies?
What are the new kinds of sexual identities which are produced and
mobilised by the internet? Is the internet, as is often celebrated in
popular discourse, really creating alternative public spheres of
freedom or is it producing new forms of exclusion and discrimination?</p>
<p align="justify">The Centre
for Internet and Society believes that while these questions have
cropped up variously, and often emphatically, in the last four
decades of Internet presence, there has been very little academic or
theoretical attention given to them. The approaches that
exist are primarily focussed on the object of change rather than the
technologies that shape the change. The accounts provided also,
instead of drawing from the mechanics and aesthetics of the
technologies, rely on earlier technologised forms to make meaning of
the new form. We find it imperative to work for a better understanding of
the way the globalised technologised world is being shaped through
the wide-spread penetration of Internet Technologies and their
material consequences.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Internet and Cyberspaces</h3>
<p align="justify">Cyberspaces,
though a smaller part of the Internet, are the most visible face of
the Internet networks. The arrival of the GUI, social networking
applications, innovative forms of interaction and networking, online
gaming, role-playing and expression platforms like blogging, and
virtual worlds, have created a fascinating network of users,
distributed across lifestyles and geographies, interacting with each
other in unprecedented forms. Cyberspaces, with their ability to
immerse the users entirely into the medium, creating a world of
incessant interaction – with technologies, with technologised
forms, with cultural products, and with the other users, who have
translated themselves, using the structures of anonymity and desire –
have led to new forms of social, cultural and economic practices
which require critical thought and analysis.</p>
<p align="justify">Cyberspaces
produce many questions – some legal, some judicial, and some
about safety, danger, and harm – which need to be answered and
engaged with at a serious level. Given the unmoderated nature of
access and production on cyberspaces, how do we make a call for
safety and caution without compromising the rights of the individual
for freedom of expression, speech and being? How do we protect the
innocent or the uninitiated, from scandals, scams or situations which
might be harmful to them, without making a call for censorship and
regimentation? As familial interactions get mediated with
technologies, how do we understand the notion of family and the
economies that surround it? With new political and cultural
mobilisations coming in effect, how do we imagine the space of the
public and the political?</p>
<p align="justify">Questions
like these have a direct bearing on the ideas of individual freedom
and right to non-discrimination, while simultaneously asking for a
moderated and controlled cyberspatial experience. The design, form,
shape and content of cyberspaces all have different implications in
these questions, and an analysis of not only the user behaviour or the
impact but the very epistemological origins and functions of such
forms is important to be studied. These concerns also bolster the
idea of digital pluralism of a certain kind – not a neo-liberal
call for solipsistic individualism but concentrating on and
bolstering the relationships that the individual has with the society
and how internet technologies mediate these relationships.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/about/substantive-areas/digital-pluralism/digital-pluralism-1'>http://editors.cis-india.org/about/substantive-areas/digital-pluralism/digital-pluralism-1</a>
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No publishernishant2009-02-06T06:31:50ZPageDigital Pluralism
http://editors.cis-india.org/about/substantive-areas/digital-pluralism
<b></b>
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No publishernishant2008-09-22T07:58:57ZFolderPublic Accountability
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No publishernishant2008-09-22T08:02:06ZFolderNew Pedagogies
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<b></b>
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No publishernishant2008-09-22T08:03:36ZFolderContact Us
http://editors.cis-india.org/about/contact/contact-us
<b></b>
<h3>Postal Address:</h3>
<blockquote></blockquote>
<p><span class="extended-address">The Centre for Internet and Society<br /> No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross,<br /> Domlur 2nd Stage<br /> Bangalore 560 071</span></p>
<p><span class="extended-address">Phone: +91 80 40926283</span><br /> Telefax: +91 80 25350955</p>
<h3></h3>
<p>If you want to get in touch with specific people:</p>
<p>For Advocacy: <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/people/our-team" class="external-link">Sunil Abraham</a> (Executive Director)<br />Email: <a class="mail-link" href="mailto:sunil@cis-india.org">sunil@cis-india.org</a><br />Phone: +919611100817</p>
<p>For Access to Knowledge, Openness, Internet Governance and Freedom of Speech: <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/people/our-team" class="external-link">Pranesh Prakash</a> <b><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/people/staff#pranesh-prakash" class="internal-link" title="Staff"></a></b>(Policy Director)<br />Email: <a class="mail-link" href="mailto:pranesh@cis-india.org">pranesh@cis-india.org</a><br />Phone: +919916158217</p>
<p>For Accessibility for Persons with Disabilities, and Telecom:<b> </b><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/people/our-team" class="external-link">Nirmita Narasimhan</a> (Policy Director)<br />Email: <a class="mail-link" href="mailto:nirmita@cis-india.org">nirmita@cis-india.org</a> <br />Phone: +918040926283</p>
<p>For Research: <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/people/our-team" class="external-link">Nishant Shah</a> (Director - Research)<br />Email: <a class="mail-link" href="mailto:nishant@cis-india.org">nishant@cis-india.org</a><br />Phone: +919740074884</p>
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No publishernishant2013-01-30T10:38:18ZPageContact Us
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No publishernishant2011-12-04T15:25:31ZFolderDigital Native: Narendra Modi’s interview by Akshay Kumar is a PR masterpiece
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-may-5-2019-digital-native-narendra-modi-interview-by-akshay-kumar-is-pr-masterpiece
<b>How to spot the influencer in your politics.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article by Nishant Shah was<a class="external-link" href="https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/digital-native-two-good-men-5706670/"> published in Indian Express </a>on May 5, 2019.</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Your digital age can easily be measured by one simple concept: the influencer. In descending order of age, there are people who have no idea what it means, those who roll their eyes at the word, those who have friends who are influencers, those who are, or think of themselves as, influencers. Despite studying and following (and sheepishly trying to imitate) influencers on social media, I still find it difficult to explain lucidly who exactly an influencer is, and what it is that she does.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>A</span><span>n influencer is a person who has many followers on social media and they influence the behaviour of these followers. They are not celebrities who influence others, but they are celebrities because they can influence others. They are not famous like traditional stars, but they are stars because so many people listen to them. They are famous for being famous, but, more importantly, they are famous as themselves — as authentic, genuine, real people who you like, and, hence, listen to. So great is the influencer phenomenon that celebrities are now adopting the genre. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span></span><span>The best example of this is the video interview of Prime Minister </span><a href="https://indianexpress.com/about/narendra-modi">Narendra Modi</a><span> by Bollywood star </span><a href="https://indianexpress.com/about/akshay-kumar/">Akshay Kumar</a><span>. Modi, who is looking to repeat his historic electoral victory of 2014, is right now undeniably the biggest political figure of our times. His promises of development, politics of resilience, and affinity for controversial alliances make him not only an extraordinary figure in India, but also stitches him into a larger global shift towards conservative populism.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Akshay Kumar, while he might not be one of the Khans, has emerged as the “common man’s hero”, especially since his last few films have focused on a persistent, if ham-handed, social messaging about critical questions of infrastructure, gender and family in the Indian psyche. So much so, that many critics had speculated if Akshay Kumar was prepping to run for elections, following in the grand tradition of many cinema stars who crossed over from the silver screen to politics.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Individually, and together, Modi and Kumar are two larger-than-life celebrities. And yet, when they came together for an interview, which was historical for several reasons — it emerged in the middle of the elections in the country and it was streamed across digital and TV platforms — they did not talk about their respective renown, portfolios or messages. Instead, they staged an “apolitical” interview, during the course of which we learned about Modi’s preference for Gujarati mangoes and ascetic discipline, and realised that the credit for Kumar’s success has to go to his directors, if this is his repertoire of acting skills.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Or, in other words, these two celebrities came together to make an influencer video — where the banal, the everyday, and the casual are used to create subtle messaging that shapes and nudges the behaviour and taste of the networked user, who is consuming the long interview as an act of eavesdropping on two regular people. This influencer aesthetic is particularly different from the gossipy antics of producer-director <a href="https://indianexpress.com/about/karan-johar/">Karan Johar</a>, with his obviously celebrity friends who joke about nepotism and laugh about how, when you are a star, they let you get away with anything.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This video might be a PR masterpiece, not because it fills up the vacuum that the delayed release of Modi’s fictional biopic had created, but because in a politically saturated environment, it chose to be airy, fluffy and chatty, thus deescalating the tense atmosphere that surrounds this current election.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We might find it difficult to follow Modi the leader, but Narendra Modi the everyday man, who decided to step up and serve his country, is hard to fault. This video saw NaMo and Akki taking the influencer aesthetic to shape the political message that amplifies Modi as our leader.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the meantime, the Opposition leaders in Congress, who desperately need a digital strategist team, did exactly the one thing they should have avoided — they took the bait of the video and went around shouting against it, thus driving more people to watch it, and giving them a chance to overcome their political preferences and relate to Modi as a human being. The Opposition strategy led to a Streisand effect, where the more they negated and critiqued, the more the video went viral, and, in an election that is already poised on a hair’s breadth, it might not be a surprise if the final vote shall be won, not by celebrity endorsements, but by influencer virality.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Nishant Shah is a professor of new media and the co-founder of The Centre for Internet & Society, Bengaluru. This article appeared in print with the headline ‘Digital Native: Two Good Men’</i></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-may-5-2019-digital-native-narendra-modi-interview-by-akshay-kumar-is-pr-masterpiece'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-may-5-2019-digital-native-narendra-modi-interview-by-akshay-kumar-is-pr-masterpiece</a>
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No publishernishantResearchers at Work2019-06-09T03:20:27ZBlog Entry