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Are India’s much-lauded startups failing their women workers?
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/are-indias-much-lauded-startups-failing-their-women-workers
<b>Recent protests outside Urban Company’s head office highlight the gendered nature of work in the country’s digital economy.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On October 8, more than 100 women beauty workers gathered outside the head office of <a class="link-external" href="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/startups/urban-company-hit-by-protests-promises-to-enhance-partners-earnings/articleshow/86925941.cms" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Urban Company in Gurgaon</a> to protest against their work conditions. The firm, an on-demand platform for home-based services, initially responded by clamping down on protesters, threatening to block their IDs and inviting police action on them.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">After continued pressure from workers and media, the company reaffirmed its commitment to “giving a voice to the voiceless” and eventually announced some measures to partly meet workers’ demands.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This was arguably the first widely-reported instance of women working with digital platforms publicly organising to take collective action. A deeper look at their demands sheds light on the gendered nature of work under India’s much-lauded tech startups.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Women’s labour market decisions are structured around trade-offs between paid work and unpaid care work at home. They also face constraints around physical mobility, security and negative familial attitudes towards their work. Digital platforms have been touted as game-changers that will increase women’s workforce participation and earnings, because of the flexibility their model offers to workers to control their work.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/F.png" alt="Tweet" class="image-inline" title="Tweet" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, far from increasing workers’ agency, platform models continue to reinforce gender norms and fail to account for factors that shape women’s work. The recent protests are a reminder that there is much to be corrected if work on platforms is to enhance women’s economic outcomes.</p>
<h3 class="cms-block-heading cms-block">Flexibility for whom?</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The term “flexibility” can be understood in various ways. From the workers’ perspective, it is usually understood as the ability to choose when and how much to work. Most platforms, including Urban Company, advertise this as one of their goals.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, from the firms’ perspective, it could mean minimising input costs while achieving high labour turnover and service quality. Platforms deploy a range of strategies to manage workforce flexibility and match concurrent demand. Key among these is the system of ratings that determine the number of leads offered to workers and may also be used to coerce them into working longer hours and performing unpaid tasks to satiate customer demands.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In Urban Company’s case, workers’ ratings are determined not just on the basis of customer feedback, but also the rates at which workers accept or cancel tasks. This becomes antithetical to increasing flexibility – workers find themselves compelled to work longer hours to meet incentives and avoid penalties. Women who find work through the app have significant childcare responsibilities, and in many cases are sole earners in female-headed households.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Suman, a single mother working as a prime service partner asked us, “When my child has an accident, will I care about the ratings or penalties? I have to stay at home and take care of him. How will I take orders then if they keep giving me leads?” Workers often face penalties such as non-negotiable deductions from wages and permanent account blockages upon low response and high cancellation rates.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As Suman’s account illustrates, these penalties make it very difficult for women to take leaves for even short intervals. The list of demands put forth by workers also includes the ability to log out from the platform for longer periods on account of maternity or other personal obligations, without rejoining fees being deducted.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Another way in which Urban Company manages workforce flexibility is through the use of artificial and arbitrarily determined service categories. During the pandemic, amidst intense fluctuations in consumer demands and spending habits, the firm introduced five sub-categories under their beauty service vertical – classic, prime, silver plus, gold plus and lux. Classification of workers into these categories was primarily based on ratings, without taking into consideration prior experience or quality of work.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">For workers in the classic category, such arbitrary classifications without considering prior experience in the beauty sector or quality of work could amount to deskilling and undervaluation of their work. Workers who have been promoted to higher categories have shared several negative implications including higher costs for uniforms and equipment, increased distance between customer locations and reduced leads with higher commission rates. In effect, these categorisations further obfuscate the rationale for lead generation and upskilling for workers.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The authors asked Urban Company about these and other matters. This article will be updated if the firm responds.</p>
<h3 class="cms-block-heading cms-block">Absence of support</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A key concern highlighted by workers is regarding the complete absence of infrastructural support necessary for dignified work. Women spend long hours commuting between their homes and multiple service locations where they receive orders. Many find it difficult to access critical amenities such as drinking water and toilets while on the commute and are denied these even within customers’ homes due to entrenched caste prejudices and discriminatory practices.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Companies also fail to support workers in case of emergencies, which has emerged as a key cause for concern among women who often work in private spaces such as customers’ homes. Workers emphasise the need for a human to respond to their calls in case of an emergency, rejecting technological solutions such as automated helplines and SOS buttons that leave workers to fend for themselves in case they are harassed by customers or in transit.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/copy_of_F.png" alt="Abhiraj" class="image-inline" title="Abhiraj" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Beyond considerations of platform design and infrastructure, workers highlight the structural precarity that stems from the business model of platform companies. The “entrepreneurship” model put forth by companies does not allow workers to access the income security that comes with regular-wage employment, nor the control and agency that is necessary for self-employment.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Media reports after the protests have lauded Urban Company for being nimble and transforming work relations in ways that are responsive to workers’ demands. What is missed in public discourse are the efforts taken by hitherto unorganised workers to bring the firm to the negotiating table with little external support, while also balancing paid work and care responsibilities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">These movements are gaining ground across sectors to hold bigger companies accountable for extracting labour from workers while claiming to empower them. Exploitative practices across lesser-known platforms remain invisible and unchecked, with most continuing with business as usual. If workers’ collective voices are to transform industry-wide conditions, it becomes imperative to listen, amplify and act on their recommendations.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; "><em>Ambika Tandon and Abhishek Sekharan are researchers at the Centre for Internet and Society, where they study the impact of digital platforms on labour cultures in India. </em><em>Read the original published in Scroll <a class="external-link" href="https://scroll.in/article/1010724/are-indias-much-lauded-startups-failing-their-women-workers">here</a></em></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/are-indias-much-lauded-startups-failing-their-women-workers'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/are-indias-much-lauded-startups-failing-their-women-workers</a>
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No publisherAbhishek Sekharan and Ambika TandonCISRAWResearchers at WorkRAW BlogFuture of Work2021-12-06T16:24:36ZBlog EntryThe State of the Internet's Languages Report
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/state-of-the-internet-languages-report-2022
<b>The first-ever State of the Internet’s Languages Report was launched by Whose Knowledge? on February 23, 2022 (just after the International Mother Language day), along with research partners Oxford Internet Institute and the Centre for Internet and Society. This extraordinarily community-sourced effort, with over 100 people involved is now available online, with translations in multiple languages. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify;">There are over 7000 (spoken and signed) languages in the world, but only a few can be fully experienced online. Challenges in accessing the internet and digital technologies in our preferred languages also means that a vast body of knowledge, especially from and by marginalised communities, is not represented and remains inaccessible to the world, thereby reiterating existing social inequalities. The State of the Internet's Languages report explores these and many other aspects related to ongoing efforts in creating a multilingual and multi-modal internet. Comprising both numbers and stories, the report features contributions in 13 languages, representing 22 language communities from 12 countries, and explores how communities across the world experience the internet.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">Read the full report <strong><a class="external-link" href="https://internetlanguages.org/en/">here</a>. </strong>See more details of the project<strong> <a class="external-link" href="https://whoseknowledge.org/initiatives/state-of-the-internets-languages/">here</a></strong></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/state-of-the-internet-languages-report-2022'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/state-of-the-internet-languages-report-2022</a>
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No publisherPuthiya Purayil SnehaRAW ResearchFeaturedResearchers at WorkRAW Blog2022-03-07T15:01:11ZBlog EntryUnderstanding Feminist Infrastructures: An Exploratory Study of Online Feminist Content Creation Spaces in India
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/understanding-feminist-structures
<b>This report explores the growth of feminist infrastructures (including the various interpretations of the term), through research on feminist publishing, content creation and curation spaces and how they have informed the contemporary discourse on feminism, gender, and sexuality in India. The rise of online feminist publications, and related digital media content creation and curation spaces, has engendered new forums for debate, networking, and community-building. This report looks at some of the challenges of developing such publications and platforms, and the role of digital infrastructures in mediating contemporary feminist work and politics.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/Feminist_Infrastructures_Report" class="external-link">Click here</a> to download the full report.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">The internet and digital media technologies have played an important role in contemporary feminist practice – in addition to social media activism, their growing prevalence in academia, advocacy, and creative expression illustrate how digital media contributes to efforts to question asymmetries of power and knowledge. In the last few years, the concept of a feminist internet and forms of feminist infrastructures have emerged as crucial entry points to understand the affordances of the digital and its many challenges, especially for women and other structurally disadvantaged communities.Feminist content creation has been integral to contemporary feminist work in India, and is an entry-point into discussions on what could be a feminist internet. The growth of online feminist publications, and related digital media content creation and curation spaces, has engendered new forums for debate, networking, and community-building. This study looks at the development of feminist infrastructures (including various interpretations of the term) through an exploration of online feminist publishing, content creation and curation spaces, and their impact on the contemporary discourse on feminism, gender, and sexuality in India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Through conversations with select online feminist publishing, content creation, and curation spaces, this study outlines motivations for choosing certain media, nature of content, languages and design, and how such choices inform practice and politics. In addition to the above, we also conducted two workshops on feminist infrastructure wishlists, and feminist principles of design and infrastructure. These conversations have offered several insights on the landscape of feminist content creation in India, and the affordances and challenges of digital technologies in facilitating contemporary feminist work. An overarching aim of the project is to unpack the term ‘feminist infrastructure’ and its interpretations in the context of the transition to digital content creation and publication. We aim to continue these conversations with a focus on the larger, often invisible role of digital infrastructures in the development of discourse on human rights, free speech and safety, to understand what are challenges to, and efforts being undertaken to create an inclusive, accessible and feminist internet.</p>
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<h3>Contributors</h3>
<div><strong>Research and Writing </strong>Puthiya Purayil Sneha and Saumyaa Naidu
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div><strong>Review </strong>Dr. Padmini Ray Murray, Design Beku</div>
<div><strong>Design </strong>Saumyaa Naidu and Yatharth</div>
<div><strong>Copy</strong> <strong>Editing </strong>The Clean Copy</div>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/understanding-feminist-structures'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/understanding-feminist-structures</a>
</p>
No publisherPuthiya Purayil Sneha and Saumyaa NaiduResearchers at WorkRAW BlogResearch2024-03-25T13:02:28ZBlog EntryThe Internet in the Indian Judicial Imagination
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_the-internet-in-the-indian-judicial-imagination
<b>This post by Divij Joshi is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Divij is a final year student at the National Law
School of India University, Bangalore and is a keen observer and researcher on issues of law, policy and technology. In this essay, he traces the history of the Internet in India through the lens of judicial trends, and looks at how the judiciary has defined its own role in relation to the Internet.</b>
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<h2>Introduction</h2>
<p>On the 14th of August, 1995, the eve of the 48th anniversary of Indian Independence, India began a new, and wholly unanticipated tryst with destiny - Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) launched India's first full Internet service for public access [1]. In 1998, just a few years after VSNL introduced dial-up Internet, around 0.5% of India’s population had regular Internet access. By 2013, the latest estimate, 15% of the country was connected to the Internet, and the number is growing exponentially [2]. As the influence of the Internet grew, the law and the courts began to take notice. In 1998, there were four mentions of the Internet in the higher judiciary (the High Courts in States and the Supreme Court of India), by 2015, it was referred to in hundreds of judgements and orders of the higher judiciary [3].</p>
<p>The revolutionary capacity of the Internet cannot be understated. It has played a critical part in displacing, creating and enhancing social structures and institutions – from the market, to ideas of community – and its potential still remains unexplored. The Internet has also unsettled legal systems around the world, because of its massive potential to create very new forms of social and legal relationships and paradigms which extant law was unequipped for. The dynamism of the Internet means that legislation and statutory law, being static and rigid, is inherently ill suited for the governance of the Internet, and much of this role is ultimately ceded to the judiciary. In a widely unregulated policy background, the role played by this institution in identifying and dealing with the peculiar nature of regulatory issues on the Internet – such as the central role of intermediaries, the challenges of intellectual property rights concerns, the conflicts of law between different jurisdictions, and the courts’ own role in being a regulator – is tremendously important. In this article, an attempt is made to weave a thread through judicial decisions as well as judicial <em>obiter</em> (or peripheral text) regarding the Internet, to explain how the judiciary has captured and defined the Internet and its capacities, potentials and actors, and what effects this has on the Internet and on society. Inter alia, this article examines how judicial disputes have shaped internet policy in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Internet and the Role of the Courts</h2>
<p>The relationship between the law and technology is reminiscent of the famous paradox posed by the greek philosopher Zeno – Achilles and a tortoise agree to race. The tortoise has a head start, and, by the logic of the paradox, Achilles is never able to catch up to him. Every time Achilles covers the distance between himself and the tortoise at any point, the tortoise has moved ahead some distance, which need to be covered once again. As Achilles covers that distance, the tortoise has once again moved a distance away, and so on, to infinite progression, proving that Achilles can never catch up to the tortoise [4].</p>
<p>The legal regulation of the Internet follows a similar path. The Internet was not an immediate concern for law and policy, which meant that its evolution was largely determined in a space free from centralized governmental regulation. By the time parliaments and courts began to understand the implications of Internet regulation, it was apparent that such regulation would be constrained by the very features of the Internet. The core feature of the Internet is decentralization of control, which is necessarily antithetical to creating a centralized legal regulation with. Moreover, the constant mutation in the function and use of the technology renders statutory law incredibly ineffective in being an adequate regulator. Even where legislatures determined a need to step in and draw special regulations for the Internet, they need to be either so broad or vague that they cede much of the regulatory space to interpreters – the courts – or be so specific that much of the regulation quickly becomes obsolete. Most importantly, the final authority to determine matters of constitutional import such as the content and scope of fundamental rights rests with the higher judiciary. In this scenario, the courts become the <em>de facto</em> policy makers for regulating technology. In light of our current political and social context, where the level of legislative debate on issues of public importance and constitutional import is negligible, the judiciary’s analysis of Internet regulation becomes even more important [5].</p>
<p>The judiciary is thus in a unique position to decide Internet policy and governance. The preliminary question is whether there is even a need to talk about the Internet as a special system with distinct policy concerns. The regulation of the Internet is certainly fundamental to the development of knowledge and education in societies, but do its unique features merit a departure from traditional law? The second and connected question is whether the law can actually play a role in determining how the Internet is shaped, i.e. how does technology respond to the law? The architecture of the system that defines the functionality of the Internet – like the TCP/IP protocol – has embodied certain values such as decentralization, autonomy, openness and privacy [6], which have to a large extent underlined the social and ethical implications of the Internet – the way it is used, the way it functions and the way it grows. These were the values explicitly introduced into the systems we use today to communicate and interact on the Internet [7]. However, there is no <em>a priori</em>, fixed nature of the Internet. The form the technologies that make up the Internet take, depend upon its architecture and its design, which are malleable, and to which laws contribute by incentivizing certain values and encumbering others. The legal regulation of the Internet, therefore critically affects the architecture of the system, and promotes and secures certain values.</p>
<p>Recognizing the effect of law upon the architecture of the Internet is critical to any balancing exercise that the judiciary has to conduct when it decides disputes about the Internet. The Internet is a unique public resource, in that its participants are (mostly) private actors pursuing a vareity of goals and interests. The values outlined above emerged in this context, where control was decetnralized and regulation depended to a large extent upon how these disparate parties act. However, the same values also disturb existing structures to control information for legitimate causes - such as protecting intellectual property rights or preventing hate speech. Adjudicating these values, often in the absence of any explicit social or political moral framework (with respect to lack of legislative or constitutional guidance on these values), the judicial responses end up as policy directions that shape the Internet. Seen outside a broader, progressive social context, which takes into account the impact of shaping technologies to reflect values, interests on the Internet are generally adjudicated and enforced as proprietary rights between private actors, which ultimately results in changing the dynamics and relative distribution of control over the technologies that make up the Internet. This proprietory conception of interests on the Internet is highly insular, and tends to undermine the intersts of the public as a stakeholder in the regulation of the Internet. This can play out in many ways – from regulation being overwhelmingly determined according to private interests like restricting new technologies in order to protect intellectual property; or with private actors imputed as the focal point of regulation, and therefore given massive control over the Internet. However, the courts can take a different approach to regulating the Internet. The judiciary, especially the Indian Supreme Court, has a generally activist trend, especially in environmental matters [8]. One of the most elegant principles invoked by the courts for the protection of the common environment, has been the public trust doctrine, which postulates that certain (environmental) resources exist for the public benefit and can only be eroded upon to ensure that they develop in the most beneficial way for the common resources [9]. A commons approach to the Internet would require a comprehensive evaluation of the roles played by different actors across different layers of the Internet and how to regulate them [10], but would be principally similar, in that rules of private property would be constrained by potential spillover effects on intellectual information resources.</p>
<p>As a prelude to examining the judicial analysis of the Internet, it is interesting to examine the judiciary’s own perception of its role in Internet regulation. Courts are constrained in their exercise of power by rules of jurisdiction, which become incredibly convoluted on the Internet. A broad assertion of state power over the net can potentially fragment it, which is an obvious problem. At the same time, state sovereignty and protection of the interests of its citizens and laws has to be balanced with the above concerns [11]. The judiciary in India first attempted to grapple with the problem by exercising ‘universal jurisdiction’ over all actions on the Internet, which allowed the Court to claim jurisdiction over a defendant as long as the website or service could be accessed from within its jurisdiction [12]. This broad-reaching standard was antithetical to the development of a harmonized, unfragmented Internet and created problems of jurisdictional and sovereign conflict. As the implications of such a direction became clear, the court evolved different standards for jurisdiction which were based on whether the Internet service had some connection with the territorial jurisdiction of the court in question. The judiciary began to develop caution in its approach towards exercising personal jurisdiction in Internet cases, first applying the ‘interactivity test’ and then the ‘specific targeting’ standards for questions of jurisdiction [13]. However, the judiciary continues to adhere to a ‘long-arm’ standard for copyright and trademark violations, which allows it to extend its jurisdiction extra-territorially under those laws, through rather specious analogies with pre-internet technologies. For example, in <em>WWE v Reshma</em> [14], the Court explicitly analogized sale of services or goods on the Internet with contracts concluded over the telephone. Although analogies provide a comfortable framework for analysis, they also shield important distinctions between technologies from legal analysis. Problems arising from Internet cases – where many actors across many jurisdictions are involved in varying degrees – are unique to Internet technologies and such analogies ignore these important distinctions. Morever, in all the above cases, the judiciary’s assertions of power over the Internet seems to be restricted only by pragmatic regulatory concerns (such as whether personal obedience of the defendant can be secured) and its evolving understanding of questions of jurisdiction are explicitly linked to changes in the use and perception of the Internet and an understanding of interactivity and communication on the Internet.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Early Internet and Judicial Perceptions</h2>
<p>The Internet crept into the judicial vocabulary in 1996; a year after public access was made available, when the Supreme Court first took cognizance of ‘Internet’ as a means of interlinking countries and gathering information instantaneously [15]. Several other cases in the High Courts also spoke of the ‘Information Highway’ [16] and the various services that companies were offering, which could be availed by individuals on the Internet [17]. This corresponded with the popular understanding of the ‘first wave’ of the Internet, mostly relating to business providing services and information to users on the World Wide Web or as a space for limited personal interaction (such as through email) [18].</p>
<p>Some of the earliest cases where the Courts had the opportunity to examine the nature of the Internet were related to Intellectual Property on the Internet, specifically trademark and copyright in the online world. The Domain Name System, which serve to identify devices accessible on the Internet, was one of the first regulatory challenges on the Internet. Domain name disputes were unprecedented in the analog world of intellectual property, since domain names were uniquely scarce goods due to the limitations of the DNS technology. In India, the Delhi High Court in the case of <em>Yahoo v Akash Arora</em> first took cognizance of regulatory challenges of the DNS system on the Internet, a space which it conceptualized as a large public network of computers, and held that domain names serve the same functions on the Internet as trademarks. This case saw the recognition of the Internet as a separate, regulable space, which the Court defined as <em>“a global collection of computer networks linking millions of public and private computers around the world.”</em> The Court recognized some of the core, democratic features of the Internet: <em>“The Internet is now recognized as an international system, a communication medium that allows anyone from any part of the lobe with access to the Internet to freely exchange information and share data.”</em> In this case, the Court upheld traditional trademark rights in the case of use of domain names. The Court’s first recognition of trademark on the Internet heralded the imputation of proprietary interests on the decentralized, shared network that was the Internet, and was a precursor to the many such cases, which mostly focused on private commercial concerns. Even as the Court understood the importance of the Internet commons, i.e. the information and architecture that makes up the Internet, it chose to ignore concerns of public interest in the openness of those commons, in its balancing of proprietary rights for trademark cases. The commercial significance of the Internet was echoed in the <em>Rediff</em> case, where the Bombay High Court opined that <em>“Undoubtedly the Internet is one of the important features of the Information Revolution. It is increasingly used by commercial organisations to promote themselves and their product and in some cases to buy and sell”</em> [19]. Moreover, in these early cases, the law of the analog age was applied wholesale to the Internet, without examining in-depth the possible differences in principle and approach, providing no precedent for the development of an ‘internet law’ [20]. Overly focussed on the proprietary nature of Internet interests, the conception of the Internet as a non-commercial space for collaboration at a decentralized or an individual level is absent from the judicial vocabulary at this stage.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Private Actors and Public Interest</h2>
<p>The Internet permits decentralization in the hands of several private actors, which makes control of information over it so difficult. However, the information and technology that makes up the Internet are also highly centralized at certain nodal points, such as the services which provide the physical infrastructure of the Internet (like ISPs) or intermediaries which create platforms for distribution of information. Since the Internet has no centralized architecture to enable governmental control, these private intermediaries fall squarely in the crosshairs of regulatory concerns, specifically concerning their liability as facilitators of offensive or illegal content and actions. Facebook, Ebay, Twitter, Myspace, YouTube and Google are examples of private actors that have emerged as dominant service providers that host, index or otherwise facilitate access to user-generated content. Other forms of intermediaries, such as software like Napster or torrent databases like The Pirate Bay, are responsible for driving the growth of Internet-based technologies, like new modes of information sharing and communication. These services have emerged as the most important platform for sharing of information and free speech on the Internet. Most of the interaction and communication on the Internet takes place through these intermediaries and therefore they are in a position to control much of the speech that takes place online. The implications of regulating such actors are quite enormous, and its context is unique to the Internet. These private actors now control the bulk of the information that is shared online, and many of them have almost monopolistic control over certain unique forms of information sharing – think Google in the case of search engines. Developing an adequate regulatory mechanism for them is therefore critical to the future of the net. If the laws do not adequately protect their ability to host content without being liable for the same, it is likely that these actors will lean towards collateral censorship of speech beyond that which is prohibited by law, simply to protect against liability. Secondly, such liability would tend to disincentivise the creation of new platforms and services that increase access to knowledge, which have been integral to innovation on the Internet [21]. The issue of intermediary liability at this scale is unique to the Internet. The court has to adequately frame policy considerations which strike at the fundamental nature of the Internet, such as intellectual property and access to information. At the same time, concerns about legal accountability need to also be addressed. The approach that courts have taken towards the role of intermediaries is therefore critical towards any examination of Internet regulation [22].</p>
<p>In India, the first court to explicitly examine the public importance in issues of online intermediary liability was in the context of regulation of pornography, specifically child pornography, which has been a mainstay of regulatory concerns on the Internet. The case prompted legislative action in the form of creating rules to secure intermediary immunity. In this case the Court imputed liability for the listings of certain offensive content upon the owners of the website, Bazzee.com. Hard cases make bad law, and the same was true of this case. Referring to the challenges of regulating content on the Internet, due to the <em>inability</em> of methods to screen and filter such content, the Court held that intermediaries must be strictly liable for all offensive content on their site. The Court held that:</p>
<blockquote>The proliferation of the internet and the possibility of a widespread use through instant transmission of pornographic material, calls for a strict standard having to be insisted upon. Owners or operators of websites that offer space for listings might have to employ content filters if they want to prove that they did not knowingly permit the use of their website for sale of pornographic material…even if for some reason the filters fail, the presumption that the owner of the website had the knowledge that the product being offered for sale was obscene would get attracted.</blockquote>
<p>Intermediaries, therefore, were imputed with the liability of controlling ‘obscene’ speech – a vague and over-broad standard which did not account for the realities of online speech [23]. The above analysis reflects the judiciary’s refusal to take into account the technical concerns on the Internet which ultimately shape its architecture – and the limitations of the judiciary in reflecting upon their own role in policy making on the internet. Ultimately, the decision was overturned by a legislative act, which invoked different standards of liability for intermediaries.</p>
<p>In <em>Consim Info Pvt. Ltd vs Google India Pvt. Ltd</em> [24], the Madras High Court considered “Keyword Advertising” and the liability of search engines and competitors for ‘meta-tags’ that resulted in search engine results which may divert a trademark holder’s traffic. Google’s AdWord programme, which allows purchase of certain ‘keywords’ for the search engine results, and can potentially enable certain forms of trademark infringement, was at issue [25]. Trademarks as AdWords or search terms fulfil and important social utility of information access [26]. However, the Court’s reasoning was conspicuously missing an analysis of the public interest in protecting and promoting search engines, which were important concerns taken into account when these issues were deliberated in other forums [27]. The Court saw this dispute only taking into account private property interests and not public interest considerations, such as the general public benefit of technology which enables new forms of searching and indexing. In fact, an argument by the defendant based on the fundamental right to free (commercial) speech was raised and ignored by the court. The Court therefore ignored the public importance of search engines in favour of protecting proprietary interests which arose in a different context.</p>
<p>Copyright law also has tremendous implications on the Internet. As the Internet became the primary mode for the distribution of different kinds of information and creative content, the very ease of sharing that contributed to its popularity made it prone to violations of copyright, and this created a conflict between the interests of traditional rights holders and the development of the Internet as a means of better sharing of information and knowledge. The problem of holding intermediaries liable for conduct has been compounded in cases where the Court ordered ex-parte ‘John Doe’ orders against unknown defendants likely to be infringing copyright, and imputed the liability for removal of such content on the intermediaries or ISP’s, effectively issuing wide blocking orders without considering their implications or even providing a fair hearing [28]. In <em>RK Productions</em> [29], for instance, when holding that ISPs could be liable for failure to follow blocking orders against infringing content, the Madras High Court described the role of ISPs, such as Airtel and VSNL, as <em>“vessels for others to use their services to infringe third party works.”</em> Once again, the court took a particularly pessimistic view of the Internet’s capabilities, limiting its analysis to the ISP’s function in facilitating infringement and holding that <em>“Without the ISPs, no person would be in a position to access the pirated contents nor would the unknown persons be in a position to upload the pirated version of the film.”</em> In <em>Myspace</em>, the Delhi High Court held that no different standard for secondary infringement (by intermediaries) applied on the Internet, and imputed the same standard as in the 1957 Copyright Act. (In fact, it explicitly compared Myspace to brick and mortar shops selling infringing DVD’s or CD’s) [30]. The Court held that the principles of immunity under the IT Act were overridden by the provisions of the Copyright Act, and then went on to impute a strict standard for intermediaries seeking safe harbor for infringing material, including, inexplicably, that provision of some means to tackle infringement would be sufficient proof of knowledge of actual infringement, and therefore implicating mere passive platforms as infringers. Further, the Court expressly rejected a post-hoc solution for the same, and held that the intermediaries must ensure prior restraint of infringing works to escape liability. The claims that arise in cases of infringement of intellectual property on the Internet, specifically in the liability of intermediaries, are unique, and have unique implications. The inability or refusal of the judiciary to identify claims of freedom of speech and freedom of information of the larger public within the internet commons, in response to broad censorship orders for preventing infringement means that implicitly, policy takes a direction that favours private interests.</p>
<p>An analysis of the above cases shows that important implications of intermediary liability such as the effect on the public’s access to information and the freedom of speech in the context of the Internet did not play a role in the Courts decisions. In particular, the examination of cases above shows that private disputes are now at the forefront of issues of public importance. The Courts have unfortunately taken an insular view of these disputes, adjudicating them as inter-party, without considering the public function that private players on the Internet provide, and how their decisions should factor in these considerations.</p>
<p>However, the recent case of <em>Shreya Singhal v Union of India</em> [31], decided by the Supreme Court this March, hopefully announces a departure from this insular examination of the Internet towards a constitutional analysis, where framing an appropriate public policy for the Internet is at the forefront of the Court’s analysis.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Shreya Singhal and Constitutionalizing the Internet</h2>
<p>In March, 2015, the Supreme Court of India struck down the notoriously abused Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, which criminalized certain classes of speech, and hopefully heralded a new phase of Internet jurisprudence in India, which imports constitutionalism into matters of cyberspace. Section 66A, premised on the pervasiveness of the Internet, criminalized online speech on vague grounds such as ‘grossly offensive’ or ‘menacing’. The Court’s examination of the nature of the Internet is particularly important. While dismissing a challenge that speech on the Internet should not be treated as distinct from other speech, the Supreme Court opined that <em>“the internet gives any individual a platform which requires very little or no payment through which to air his views”</em>, and by this reasoning concluded that to a limited extent, specific offences could be drawn for online speech. However, this understanding of the features of the Internet – the democratization of knowledge sharing by making it cheap and expansive, was implicit throughout the Court’s judgement, which upheld the idea of the Internet as a ‘marketplace of ideas’ and a space for free and democratic exchange, and struck down the impugned restrictive provisions as unconstitutional, in part because of their vagueness and likelihood to censor legitimate speech, bearing no relation to the constitutional restrictions on free speech under Article 19(2). Moreover, the Court understood the importance of collateral censorship and intermediary safe harbor, although only briefly examined, and read down expansive intermediary liability terms under the IT Rules to include prior judicial review of takedown notices [32].</p>
<p>Hopefully, the Shreya Singhal judgement marks the beginning of constitutional engagement of the judiciary with the Internet. At this moment itself, the Supreme Court is grappling with questions of limitations of online pornography [33]; search engine liability for hate speech [34]; intermediary liability for defamation [35]; and liability for mass surveillance. How the Supreme Court takes cognizance of these cases, how they ultimately proceed, and how they take into account the principles sounded by the <em>Shreya Singhal</em> court, will have a tremendous impact on the internet and society in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>This article was an attempt to study the Internet in India, and look at the relationship between the judiciary and the Internet. But ‘the Internet’ is not some fixed, immutable space, and any study has to take this into account. The function of the Internet depends upon the values built in to it. These values can be in favor of free speech, or enable censorship. They can protect privacy, or enable mass surveillance. The growth of the Internet as a medium of free speech and expression has been fuelled to a large extent in the spaces free of legal regulation, but the law is perhaps the most important regulator of the Internet, in its ability to use state power to create incentives for certain values, and to change the nature of the Internet. This study, therefore, charted the dynamic relationship between judicial law and other factors responsible for the regulation of the Internet.</p>
<p>For a technology which is so pervasive in our daily lives, and growing in importance day by day, it is surprising that the Supreme Court of India has only recently taken cognizance of constitutional issues on the Internet. While important internet-specific issues have arisen in disputes before the judiciary, judicial examination has generally ignored technical nuances of the new technology, and furthermore ignored the wider implications of framing Internet policy by applying rules that applied in other contexts, such as for copyright or trademark. Without a clear articulation of political and moral bases to guide Internet policy, a clear policy-driven approach to the Internet remains absent, and the regulatory space has been captured by fragmented interest groups without an assessment of larger interests in maintaining the Internet commons, such as allowing peer-based production and sharing of information.</p>
<p>There is, however, reason to be optimistic about the courts and the Internet. The Supreme Courts reaffirmation and identification of the freedom of speech on the Internet in <em>Shreya Singhal</em>, will, hopefully, resonate in the policy decisions of both the courts and legislators, and the internet can be reformulated as a space deserving constitutional scrutiny and protection.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>[1] VSNL Starts India's First Internet Service Today, The Indian Technomist, (14th August, 1995), available at <a href="http://dxm.org/techonomist/news/vsnlnow.html">http://dxm.org/techonomist/news/vsnlnow.html</a>.</p>
<p>[2] Internet Statistics by Country, International Telecommunication Union, available at <a>http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/stat/default.aspx</a>.</p>
<p>[3] Source: <a href="http://manupatra.com/">http://manupatra.com/</a>.</p>
<p>[4] Nick Huggett, Zeno's Paradoxes, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), available at <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/paradox-zeno/">http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/paradox-zeno/</a>.</p>
<p>[5] See: <a href="http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/a-little-reminder-no-one-in-house-debated-section-66a-congress-brought-it-and-bjp-backed-it/">http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/a-little-reminder-no-one-in-house-debated-section-66a-congress-brought-it-and-bjp-backed-it/</a>; Publicly available records of Lok Sabha debates also show no mention of this controversial law.</p>
<p>[6] I take values to mean certain desirable goals and methods, which could be both intrinsically good to pursue and whose pursuit allows other instrumental goods to be achieved. See Michael J. Zimmerman, Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Value, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), available at <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/value-intrinsic-extrinsic/">http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/value-intrinsic-extrinsic/</a>.</p>
<p>[7] Hellen Nissenbaum, How Computer Systems Embody Values, Computer Magazine, 118, (March 2001), available at <a href="https://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/embodyvalues.pdf">https://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/embodyvalues.pdf</a>.</p>
<p>[8] S.P. Sathe, Judicial Activism: The Indian Experience, 6 Washington University Journal of Law & Policy, 29, (2001).</p>
<p>[9] M.C. Mehta v. Kamal Nath and Ors., 2000(5) SCALE 69.</p>
<p>[10] Yochai Benkler, From Consumers to Users: Shifting the Deeper Structures of Regulation Toward Sustainable Commons and User Access, 52(3) Federal Communications Law Journal, 561, (2000).</p>
<p>[11] Thomas Shultz, Carving up the Internet: Jurisdiction, Legal Orders, and the Private/Public International Law Interface, 19(4) European Journal Of International Law, 799, (2008); Wendy A. Adams, Intellectual Property Infringement in Global Networks: The Implications of Protection Ahead of the Curve, 10 Int’l J.L. & Info. Tech, 71, (2002).</p>
<p>[12] Casio India Co. Limited v. Ashita Tele Systems Pvt. Limited, 2003 (27) P.T.C. 265 (Del.) (India).</p>
<p>[13] Banyan Tree Holding (P) Ltd. v. A. Murali Krishna Reddy & Anr., CS(OS) 894/2008.</p>
<p>[14] World Wrestling Entertainment v. Reshma Collection (FAO (OS) 506/2013 (Delhi).</p>
<p>[15] Dr. Ashok v. Union of India and Ors., AIR 1997 SC 2298.</p>
<p>[16] Rajan Johnsonbhai Christy vs State Of Gujarat, (1997) 2 GLR 1077.</p>
<p>[17] Union Of India And Ors. Vs. Motion Picture Association And Ors, 1999 (3) SCR 875; Yahoo!, Inc. vs Akash Arora & Anr., 1999 IIAD Delhi 229 – “The Internet provides information about various corporations, products as also on various subjects like educational, entertainment, commercial, government activities and services.”</p>
<p>[18] Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks.</p>
<p>[19] Rediff Communication Limited vs Cyberbooth & Another, 1999 (4) Bom CR 278.</p>
<p>[20] Even when the Supreme Court finally recognized these concerns a few years later, when the Internet had morphed into a massive commercial platform and an important forum for free speech, in the Satyam Infotech case (2004(3)AWC 2366 SC), it discussed the unique problem of domain name identifiers and scarcity of domain names, yet went on to hold that an even higher standard of passing off for trademarks should apply in domain names, disregarding the prior standard of an ‘honest concurrent user’.</p>
<p>[21] Jack Balkin, The Future of Free Expression in a Digital Age, 36 Pepperdine Law Review, (2008)</p>
<p>[22] Id.</p>
<p>[23] Avnish Bajaj v. State (NCT of Delhi), 3 Comp. L.J. 364 (2005).</p>
<p>[24] 2013 (54) PTC 578 (Mad)</p>
<p>[25] The judgement also reveals the predominance of Google’s search engine service. The Court defines the operation of “search engines” as synonymous with Google’s particular service – including adding elements like the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ option as defining elements of search engines.</p>
<p>[26] David J. Franklyn & David A. Hyman, Trademarks As Search Engine Keywords: Much Ado About Something?, 26(2) Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, 540, (2013).</p>
<p>[27] Id.</p>
<p>[28] Reliance Big Entertainment v. Multivision Network and Ors, Delhi High Court, available at <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/john-doe-order-reliance-entertainment-v-multivision-network-and-ors.-movie-singham">http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/john-doe-order-reliance-entertainment-v-multivision-network-and-ors.-movie-singham</a>; Sagarika Music Pvt. Ltd. v. Dishnet Wireless Ltd., C.S. No. 23/2012, G.A. No. 187/2012 (Calcutta High Court Jan. 27, 2012) (order); See Generally, Ananth Padmanabhan, Give Me My Space and Take Down His, 9 Indian Journal of Law and Technology, (2013).</p>
<p>[29] R.K. Productions v. BSNL Ltd and Ors. O.A.No.230 of 2012, Madras High Court.</p>
<p>[30] Super Cassetes Industries Ltd. v. Myspace Inc. and Anr., 2011 (47) P.T.C. 49 (Del.)</p>
<p>[31] Shreya Singhal and Ors. V Union of India and Ors., W.P.(Crl).No. 167 of 2012, Supreme Court, (2015).</p>
<p>[32] The courts refusal to address important questions of intermediary responsibility has also been criticized, see Jyoti Pandey, The Supreme Court Judgment in Shreya Singhal and What It Does for Intermediary Liability in India?, Centre for Internet and Society, available at <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/sc-judgment-in-shreya-singhal-what-it-means-for-intermediary-liability">http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/sc-judgment-in-shreya-singhal-what-it-means-for-intermediary-liability</a>.</p>
<p>[33] See: <a href="http://sflc.in/kamlesh-vaswani-v-uoi-w-p-c-no-177-of-2103/">http://sflc.in/kamlesh-vaswani-v-uoi-w-p-c-no-177-of-2103/</a>.</p>
<p>[34] See: <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/search-engine-and-prenatal-sex-determination">http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/search-engine-and-prenatal-sex-determination</a>.</p>
<p>[35] See: <a href="https://indiancaselaws.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/google-india-pvt-ltd-vs-visaka-industries-limited/">https://indiancaselaws.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/google-india-pvt-ltd-vs-visaka-industries-limited/</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<em>The post is published under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International</a> license, and copyright is retained by the author.</em>
<p> </p>
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No publisherDivij JoshiInternet StudiesInternet LawJudiciaryRAW BlogResearchers at Work2015-09-09T05:26:50ZBlog EntryProcurement Through Digital Platforms
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/procurement-through-digital-platforms
<b>Procurement policies, both public and private, can play a significant role in determining inclusive market participation, particularly for informal women workers and their collective enterprises. </b>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">Executive Summary</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Various factors, including pricing, compliance and transparency in systems, can determine how and upto what extent women are able to utilise procurement platforms. With the emergence of a new, digital economy, procurement platforms (public and private) too have adopted technology-enabled systems. For informal women workers and their collective enterprises, the ability to engage with these interfaces also determines if and to what extent they can link with the supply chain.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In this report, we map the experiences of women’s collective enterprises (owned by informal women workers), particularly their capacities to use digital procurement platforms and the concurrent challenges that they face. The challenges highlighted in this report present an opportunity for procurement policies to deliberate and adapt, so that women workers can also utilise these platforms.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As a Women’s Enterprise Support System, SEWA Cooperative Federation was able to study eight women’s collective enterprises - owned, managed and used by informal women workers - with respect to procurement.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We interviewed board members, managers, and members of these collective enterprises, across sectors: agriculture, manufacturing, services, transport, and were able to understand key issues that emerged.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Click to <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/procurement-digital-platforms.pdf" class="internal-link">read the full report</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/procurement-through-digital-platforms'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/procurement-through-digital-platforms</a>
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No publisherSEWA Cooperative Federation and Centre for Internet & SocietyResearchers at WorkRAW Blog2022-07-26T14:35:47ZBlog EntryEssays on #List — Selected Abstracts
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/essays-on-list-selected-abstracts
<b>In response to a recent call for essays that social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, or aesthetic dimensions of the #List, we received 11 abstracts. Out of these, we have selected 4 pieces to be published as part of a series titled #List on the r@w blog. Please find below the details of the selected abstracts. The call for essays on #List remains open, and we are accepting and assessing the incoming abstracts on a rolling basis.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>1. <a href="#manisha">Manisha Chachra</a></h4>
<h4>2. <a href="#meghna">Meghna Yadav</a></h4>
<h4>3. <a href="#sarita">Sarita Bose</a></h4>
<h4>4. <a href="#shambhavi">Shambhavi Madan</a></h4>
<hr />
<h3 id="manisha"><strong>Manisha Chachra</strong></h3>
<h4><em>MeToo in Indian journalism: Questioning access to internet among intersectional women and idea of rehabilitative justice in digital spaces</em></h4>
<p>The advent of LoSHA and MeToo era witnessed an intriguing intersection of technology, politics and gender. The list and name-shame culture of social media has not only displayed changing power dynamics in digital space but an increasing movement towards engendering of internet spaces. The social, political and economic matrix defined by power relationships -- a patriarchy reflected in internet spaces, percolating in our interactions confronted a major challenge when women rose up to claim the same space. Internet space cannot be called a virtual reality as it is a sharp mirror into what is going in the power dynamics of society and politics. My paper broadly seeks to examine this engendering of spatial reality of digital space by looking at various conversations that took place on Twitter around MeToo in Indian journalism. MeToo has been widely understood as narration of one’s tale and how that experiential reality is connected with other women. However, a universalisation of such an experience often neglects intersectional reality attached to women’s experiences -- belonging to different caste, class, ethnicity and other
kinds of differences. My paper attempts to question how far MeToo in digital space accommodated the differential aspects of woman as a heterogeneous category. The spatial realities of technological spaces function like a double edged sword-- liberating as well as mobility paralysing. I use the term mobility paralysis to denote a contradiction in digital space-- which might be equally available to all sections of women but not fairly accessible. The accessibility is often a reflection of deep rooted patriarchies and kinship relationships that bind women in same
voiceless zone. MeToo in Indian journalism is a case study of how women of different backgrounds access digital spaces in questioning this mobility paralysis and inch towards a certain kind of emancipatory politics. Examining MeToo from the perspective of a social movement emerging on Twitter and Facebook, I aim to scrutinise scope of rehabilitative justice for the accused. The emergence of lists, and claiming of spaces is attached to the question of justice and being guilty or innocent of allegations. Online spaces in the recent times have also emerged as platforms of e-khaps (online khap panchayats with certain gatekeepers of the movement) where screenshot circulation, photoshop technology could be used to garner a public response against a particular person. It is interesting how after MeToo the question was not whether the person is guilty or accused rather how they should abandon their social media accounts and probably go absent virtually. In such a context, it is crucial to question the relationship between justice, one’s digital identity and who owns this identity. If rehabilitative justice is not an option, and apology-seeking is not available, what are we hoping from MeToo? The aim of any name-shame movement must be to reclaim digital space, narrate experiences and also to leave scope for others to respond, and seek justice. The question of justice is also closely linked with how women from intersectional backgrounds access internet, and emancipate
themselves.</p>
<h3 id="meghna"><strong>Meghna Yadav</strong></h3>
<p>For most people, the Internet is now synonymous with social media. Likewise, consumption of content on the Internet has shifted. We’ve moved from an earlier design of explicitly going to content-specific websites, to now, simply “logging in” and being presented with curated content spanning multiple areas. The infrastructure for consuming this content, however, remains predominantly screen based, implying a space constraint. Websites must, hence, decide what content users are to be presented with and in what order. In other words, social media must
generate itself as a ranked list of content.</p>
<p>In the classical theory of social choice, a set of voters is called to rank a set of alternatives and a social ranking of the alternatives is generated. In this essay, I propose to look at ranking of content as a social choice problem. Ranking rules of different social media platforms can be studied as social welfare functions for how they aggregate the preferences of their voters (i.e. users). Current listings of content could be modelled as the results of previously held rounds of voting. Taking examples, Reddit is built on a structure of outward voting, visceral through ‘upvotes’ and ‘downvotes’, constantly displaying to users the choice they have to alter content ranks on the website. TikTok, on the other hand, relies on taking away most of the voting power of its users.</p>
<p>As the Internet tends towards centralisation, studying how different list ranking rules aggregate our choices and in turn, alter the choices presented to us, becomes important to design a more democratic Internet.</p>
<h3 id="sarita"><strong>Sarita Bose</strong></h3>
<h4><em>Mapping goes local: A study of how Google Maps tracks user’s footprints and creates a ‘For You’ list</em></h4>
<p>The ‘Explore Nearby’ feature in Google Maps has three sections – Explore, Commute and For You. Of this, ‘For You’ section contains ‘Lists based on your local history’ as mentioned by Google itself. The Google Maps auto tracks a user’s movements and creates a digital footprint map and lists up events, programmes, restaurants, shops etc for the user. This research will focus on the ‘For You’ feature of Google Maps and its cultural and social dimensions. The work will focus on how the mapping is done and the logic behind drawing up the list. It will try to find out how the economy of Google Maps works. Why some lists shows up while some doesn’t. What kind of ‘algorithm – economy – user’ matrix is used to make up the list? The work will also try to understand cultural dimensions based on mind mapping techniques of Google. This research will follow three dimensions. The first is the mapping of user’s footprints itself and how the distance covered by a user becomes the user’s own digital existence. The Google Maps automatically asks for reviews of places the user might have visited or passed. The question is what algorithm is Google using to ask for the review? Is it pre-pointed or post-pointed? Thus, we come to the second part. Is Google only listing places that paid it or is it trying to digitally map a user’s area of geographical reach in general. If so, why? This brings us to the third dimension of the research work. What kind of cultural mapping is done of the user? The list the user gets is based on his own history and as more data is added, the more mapping is done. These three dimensions are intricately woven with each other and the work will try to establish this relationship.</p>
<h3 id="shambhavi"><strong>Shambhavi Madan</strong></h3>
<h4><em>List of lists of lists: Technologies of power, infrastructures of memory</em></h4>
<p>Lists make infinities comprehensible, and thus controllable. By virtue of the ubiquity of cyberspace and the digitized information infrastructures curating reality within these infinities, we are increasingly subjected to curatorial efforts of individuals as well as codes – algorithmic and architectural.</p>
<p>Statistical lists are Foucauldian technologies of power in modern societies; tools for the functioning of governmentality – not just in terms of state control over population phenomena but the governmentality of groups or individuals over themselves. The framework of biopolitics identifies a bureaucracy imposed by determining social classifications through listing and categorizing, within which people must situate themselves and their actions (Foucault, 2008). Thus, the authorship of lists is often reflective of power that allows for the perpetuation of hegemonic constructions of social reality, making the lists themselves sites of struggle.</p>
<p>This paper seeks to contextualize (public-oriented) lists as forms of biopolitical curation that often lie at points of intersection between collective consciousness and social order, through an approach that problematizes the socio-technics of agency and the subjective objectivity of authorship. Although list-making acts such as the National Population Register, NRC, #LoSHA, the electoral roll, the census, and Vivek Agnihotri’s call for a list of “Urban Naxals” all differ in terms of content, intent, and impact, and contain different asymmetries of power, the lowest common denominator lies in their role as producers of public knowledge and consequently, infrastructures of public memory. This approach allows for a reinterpretation of the fundamental duality of lists of and within publics: <em>the functionality of enforcing/maintaining social order, and the phenomenological practise of publicly self-presenting with a (semi-material) manifestation of a collective identity</em>. The former sees the use of lists as tools of population management, enacting citizenship and belonging through forms of inclusion and exclusion; the latter is reflective of the workings of self-autonomy – redefining the authorship of justice and punishment – in networked societies. Thus, a secondary theme in this paper would be to question the change and significance in the role of authorship through a phenomenological comparative of lists that are institutionalised practice versus those that are open and collaborative.</p>
<p>Both the act of list-making and the lists themselves are framed as coalescences of material and imaginary, by juxtaposing the idea of infrastructures as primarily relationalities – i.e. they can’t be theorized in terms of the object alone (Larkin, 2013) – with Latour’s relational ontology of human and non-human actors. The list itself is a non-human object/actant that after emerging as a product of co-construction, takes on an agential role of its own (Latour, 2005). Each of these lists can be considered as a quasi-object, a complex convergence of the technological and the social. Both #LoSHA and the NRC are not mere placeholders being ‘acted upon’, but real and meaningful actors acting as cultural mediators and not intermediaries. The integration of a socio-technical, infrastructural approach with one that emphasizes upon the aesthetics of authorship and public memory allows the subject to be seen as constitutive of an embodied, relational experience as opposed to just existing as a dissociative (re)presentation.</p>
<p><strong>References:</strong></p>
<p>Foucault, M. 2008. <em>The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979</em>. Trans. G. Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.</p>
<p>Larkin, B. 2013. "The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructural." <em>Annual Review of Anthropology</em>. 42:327-343.</p>
<p>Latour, B. 2005. <em>Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory</em>. Oxford: Oxford University Press.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/essays-on-list-selected-abstracts'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/essays-on-list-selected-abstracts</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppResearchers at WorkListRAW BlogFeaturedInternet Studies2019-09-03T13:38:12ZBlog EntryHow Green is the Internet? The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_how-green-is-the-internet-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly
<b>This essay by Aishwarya Panicker is part of the 'Studying Internet in India' series. The author draws attention to the fact that there is little data, debate, analysis, and examination of the environmental impact of the internet, which is true especially for India. She explores four central issue areas. First, as the third highest country in terms of internet use, what is the current environmental impact of internet usage in India? Second, are there any regulatory provisions that give prescriptive measures to data centres and providers? Third, do any global standards exist in this regard and finally, what future steps can be taken (by the government, civil society and individuals) to address this?</b>
<p> </p>
<h3>Introduction</h3>
<p>Groceries at your doorstep, data on your fingertips, an Uber at the tap of a button and information overload- human negotiations with the internet have definitely changed drastically over the past few decades. Research in the area, too, has transformed-covering not just its evolution and impact, but also assessing innovative and revolutionary ideas in terms of access, internet infrastructure as well as governance to name a few. With over 3.2 Billion internet users in the world <strong>[1]</strong>, and over 400 million of these from India <strong>[2]</strong>, this is no surprise. How can we move beyond particular fascinations with the internet and engage holistically with it? - by moving towards a dimension of internet infrastructure studies that has large policy and sustainable development benefits. This paper, then, will seek to elucidate one central issue area: as the third highest country in terms of internet use, what is the current environmental impact of internet usage in India?</p>
<p>It is widely recognized that India still has miles to go before it reaches complete internet connectivity – be it at the rural or urban geographies. With millions still on the fringes of the online/offline world, it does seem that having access to the internet is still a privilege. However, with over 400 million (around 35 % of the total population) active users, and a fast growing young user base, the implications are vast. The message here is clear, India’s communications reality is changing, and it is changing at warp speed; second, there are constant reassurances to convince us of its growth. At a policy level, the national government has put in place an $18 billion Digital India Initiative that has an outlay of ₹70,000 crore for creating a high-speed Internet grid that will help bridge the rural-urban online divide. At a consumer level, more people are beginning to realise the benefits of using the net for their own daily needs. This should mean that more people will be able to avail the multitude of benefits from this wide web (using less paper, banking online, travelling less for shopping, for example), doing things that are obviously good for the environment, right? Yes, and no.</p>
<p>Measuring or assessing environment impact, for any particular product or service, requires a look into the cost foregone by using that particular product or service. In order to get a wider look into the environmental impact of the internet, we need to check the data available for hardware usage and waste generation, infrastructure provisions and finally, accurate data generation.</p>
<p>Climate change and carbon footprints are terms that have been used as buzzwords to death this past decade, but while environmental sustainability remains at the forefront of many-a-government, there is little data/ debate/ analysis/ examination of the environmental impact of communication systems connected to the net. This is true especially for India. In 2011, Joel Gombiner wrote an academic paper <strong>[3]</strong> on the problem of the Internet’s carbon footprint, with a premise based on the lesser known fact that the ICT industry has been ‘responsible for two to four percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions’- an area that the Climate Group’s Smart 2020 report <strong>[4]</strong> had focused on back in 2008 as well. Clearly this is a war on the environment that is yet to receive large-scale attention.</p>
<h3>“What a Waste”</h3>
<p>‘By 2020, a third of the global population will own a PC, 80% will own a mobile phone, and one in 20 households will have a broadband connection’ <strong>[5]</strong>. What does this mean? It means that as demand increases for internet-capable machines, it is vital to look at cycles of ownership and disposal. Wifi access routers, mobile phones, laptops, desktops, optic fibre infrastructure, Ethernet cables- all of these products individually and together, add to the constant waste creation cycle. With mobile ownership at a massive 1009.46 million (as of May 2015), and 2G/3G/4G services on the rise, in addition to the already 400 million strong online community owning laptops/desktops, e-waste is now regarded as one of the largest growing problems in India. While about ‘2.7 million tons of electronic waste are being generated annually’, a large portion of this is from mobile phones/laptops/desktops. With high turnover of new products, as well as obsolete machines, and largely unregulated practices of waste collection, there are areas of where extremely hazardous contents are entering the air, underground water and soil from our city landfills. About 80 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions are produced by India currently-these emissions only add on to the total carbon dioxide and other noxious emissions created at the manufacturing stage as well as from the use of devices. While several recycling factories have come up to tackle the gargantuan task of using e-waste, there are of, course, other areas that require immediate attention- this includes mining safety, human rights of workers, natural mineral resource excavation and risk control measures. While rules are in place for the re-use and sorting of e waste (which include suggestions that plants be set up for the sorting, dismantling and processing of waste so that hazardous parts can be treated while the rest is recycled), the reality is far from it. E waste landfills are usually “processed” or mined by manual labor who wear little to no protection from the tiny parts/components that can cause them bodily harm- often causing them musko-skeletal, respiratory or gastro intestinal illnesses. A study done by the NGO Chintan, which studied over 2000 wastepickers, found that they had no idea about the health risks their livelihood poses <strong>[6]</strong>. This urban informal workforce are at the forefront of the waste management cycle and but their current status raises the question- whose responsibility is it to make e-waste recycling safe? The contractors who hire the manual workers, the recycling plants who buy the materials from them, or the manufacturers who create the products?</p>
<h3>Order in Chaos – The Internet Infrastructure Landscape</h3>
<p>Another way to assess environmental impact is by understanding the current internet infrastructure landscape – the supply structure. Under the Digital India initiative, the Central government plans to lay 700,000 km (434,960 miles) of broadband cable connecting 250,000 village clusters in the next three years and constructing 100 new "Smart Cities" by 2020 <strong>[7]</strong>. More connectivity also equals more data centres, larger servers, network equipment, cooling equipment, constant electricity usage and generators. A report by Gartner stated that data centres on average, ‘account for a quarter of the energy consumed by the entire ICT sector’.</p>
<p>As more and more data is generated- what is called our digital footprint- more information is sent back and forth to servers within data centres.</p>
<p>More data = more servers = more electricity = more emissions.</p>
<p>Data storage is being called one of the ‘primary drivers of emissions’ in the ICT industry. According to Gartner, about 6.6 million sq feet of data centre capacity exists today in India. Of course, their benefits do seem to override the electrical cost- using big data for research, social networking, new forms of information processing are just some of them. In addition, some steps are being taken by companies to cut down their environmental (and financial) cost by merging to form collocation spaces. In India, there are, in total, over a hundred collocation data centres in India <strong>[8]</strong>. These collocation spaces are data centers in which businesses can rent space for their servers and other computing needs.</p>
<p>For the mobile broadband industry, connecting millions more to the Internet also means a jump in the device emissions through routers, modems, cell towers etc. These cell towers and data centres perform at a sub optimal level due to the pervasive power deficit across India. Increasing times for load shedding in the semi-urban and rural areas also means a greater burden on generators which are usually diesel, and tend to greatly increase energy costs. Telecom towers, a study (ibid) says, consumes 2 billion litres of diesel a year, accounting for almost 5 million tons of CO2 annually <strong>[9]</strong>.</p>
<p>However, studies are being done on programs that uses renewable energy to power these towers- potentially cutting down emissions considerably. With the growth of Smart Power Grids, Energy Proportional Behavior and the rise of internal ‘Green Code’ with ICT companies, there is hope for energy efficiency methods to allow for greater utilization of machines and infrastructure at lower environmental cost.</p>
<h3>Data Aggregation</h3>
<p>Having tried a few websites that allow you to trace your own carbon footprints <strong>[10]</strong>, (depending on which household item/ type of transport/ you want to check it for) it does still seem to be quite complicated and opaque. Especially since most of these websites ignore the usage of particular technology/ other products that leave a footprint, and are hence, skewed in the data they provide. I was unable to pinpoint a footprint for my history of computer/laptop usage, and while HP and other companies do maintain online calculators, magnifying this to all gadgets that utilize the internet across entire populations that use it, is definitely a gargantuan task. Until this area is more user friendly and accurate, it will be quite impossible to research this aspect of the internet’s impact on the countless products owned by individuals.</p>
<p>Besides inaccurate and vague data generated at an individual level, there is also little to no information on a per-click basis, what an individuals’ contribution is. What does my time surfing the internet truly imply? Does my constant connectivity to the net from my phone/ laptop for over 15 hours a day mean something more than what I use it for? The information I found zeroed in on the terms direct and indirect emissions- that the company manufacturing my phone or laptop have resulted in direct emissions but that there are indirect emissions as well, all the things that happen for the laptop/mobile to have reached me have an impact, the hundreds of websites I scour in a week have an impact, right down to the staff of software companies I have downloaded from, have an impact. While this seems too minute to calculate, too cumbersome to pin down, it brings us to the point where any metric to have a final and definite number attached to our internet usage can never be accurate. In their book, <em>The Burning Question</em>, Duncan Clark and Mike Berners-Lee put forth the view that it is because of the infrastructure and mental lock - in that the world has put itself in, a state which disallows a wider understanding of real issues, that prevents any new energy efficiency technologies to be put in place.</p>
<p>India has become a big player in ICT industry worldwide- especially in the research and development areas. With our participation in the Global ICT Standardization Forum, it is vital that there is continued effort towards sustainable methods of tackling e-waste, ensuring that the growth of internet infrastructure and governance follow particular guidelines. The internet, of course, plays a crucial role in bringing us closer to a low-CO2 based world-but do its environmental benefits outweigh the end impact? Maybe/ Maybe not. While there are increasing number of advocates of the low- energy impact of the web <strong>[11]</strong>, it is not possible to live in a vacuum of its benefits, but to also engage with the wider web of its functioning and operations. The significance of well informed opinions and actions should be based on correct data - more in depth research in this field is how we can come closer to it. If sustainable and inclusive development has to go hand in hand with Smart cities, and if India is serious about it, it is high time we made ICT a more environment friendly industry as well as a research friendly industry. Should you as an individual stop everything you do with the internet? No! But it is time to think, talk, question and research about it.</p>
<h3>Endnotes</h3>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> International Telecommunications Union. 2015. ‘ICT Facts & Figures- The World in 2015’ <a href="https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2015.pdf">https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2015.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> IAMAI. 2015. <a href="http://www.iamai.in/media/details/4490">http://www.iamai.in/media/details/4490</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> Gombiner, Joel. <a href="http://www.consiliencejournal.org/index.php/consilience/article/viewFile/141/57">http://www.consiliencejournal.org/index.php/consilience/article/viewFile/141/57</a> (last accessed on 01/08/2016).</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> Global E-Sustainability Initiative. 2008. <a href="http://www.smart2020.org/publications/">http://www.smart2020.org/publications/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> Singh, Om Pal & Pratibha Singh. IJERMT. 2015. <a href="http://www.ermt.net/docs/papers/Volume_4/12_December2015/V4N12-190.pdf">http://www.ermt.net/docs/papers/Volume_4/12_December2015/V4N12-190.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> India Climate Dialogue. 10th December, 2015. <a href="http://indiaclimatedialogue.net/2015/12/10/indias-rising-tide-of-e-waste/">http://indiaclimatedialogue.net/2015/12/10/indias-rising-tide-of-e-waste/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> Financial Express. ‘Govt has grand IT Plans for India’. April 2015. <a href="http://www.financialexpress.com/economy/it-plans-suffer-from-power-cuts-congestion-and-monkeys-in-pm-narendra-modis-varanasi/59770/">http://www.financialexpress.com/economy/it-plans-suffer-from-power-cuts-congestion-and-monkeys-in-pm-narendra-modis-varanasi/59770/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> <a href="http://www.datacentermap.com/profile.html">http://www.datacentermap.com/profile.html</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> Smarter 2020 - The Role of ICT in Driving a Sustainable Future. <a href="http://gesi.org/assets/js/lib/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins/ajaxfilemanager/uploaded/SMARTer%202020%20-%20The%20Role%20of%20ICT%20in%20Driving%20a%20Sustainable%20Future%20-%20December%202012.pdf">http://gesi.org/assets/js/lib/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins/ajaxfilemanager/uploaded/SMARTer%202020%20-%20The%20Role%20of%20ICT%20in%20Driving%20a%20Sustainable%20Future%20-%20December%202012.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> For example - <a href="http://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx">http://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong> Think Progress. ‘Debunking the myth of internet as an energy hog’. June, 2010. <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2010/06/21/206254/internet-energy-use-myth/">http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2010/06/21/206254/internet-energy-use-myth/</a>.</p>
<h3>Author Profile</h3>
<p>Aishwarya Panicker is currently an Independent Consultant, with over 5 years of experience in the development and policy space in India. She has an undergraduate degree in Sociology from Lady Shri Ram College, and a
graduate degree in Global Politics (specializing in Political Economy) from the London School of Economics.</p>
<p>She works closely on the institutional problems of service delivery in the rural and urban contexts - looking at social sector policies, technology, governance, and their impact on citizen-state interactions in India. Prior
to becoming an Independent Researcher, she worked at the Centre for Policy Research for three years. She has also worked with CKS, CII, and FICCI in the past.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_how-green-is-the-internet-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_how-green-is-the-internet-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly</a>
</p>
No publisherAishwarya PanickerResearchers at WorkRAW BlogEnvironmental Impact2016-09-23T05:02:50ZBlog EntryMobilizing Online Consensus: Net Neutrality and the India Subreddit
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_mobilizing-online-consensus-net-neutrality-and-the-india-subreddit
<b>This essay by Sujeet George is part of the 'Studying Internet in India' series. The author offers a preliminary gesture towards understanding reddit’s usage and breadth in the Indian context. Through an analysis of the “India” subreddit and examining the manner and context in which information and ideas are shared, proposed, and debunked, the paper aspires to formulate a methodology for interrogating sites like reddit that offer the possibilities of social mediation, even as users maintain a limited amount of privacy. At the same time, to what extent can such news aggregator sites direct the ways in which opinions and news flows change course as a true marker of information generation responding to user inputs.</b>
<p> </p>
<h3><strong>Introduction</strong></h3>
<p>It is almost an Internet truism that the comments section on any website is the cesspool that festers the basest of human instincts. Insults and abuses abound, users ‘call out’ each other’s opinions, their choice of words and, on a <del>bad</del> regular day, even each other’s parentage. The spectre of online anonymity, it has been suggested, affords the possibility of channelling opinion without being accountable for it. This is the more cynical outlook on how online opinion forums function; a viewpoint which although credible is limited as it sidelines the more engaging aspects of these forums. Such an interface dynamic has historically offered two modes of checks and balances: the original content to which users commented on was determined (and often written) by the administrators of the website, and in many cases the comments were moderated by those who ran the website.</p>
<p>Social news websites in the age of Web 2.0 have radically altered the means of production of content. By handing over to web-users the keys to the content generation storehouse, news aggregator websites like 4chan and Reddit have supposedly democratized the volume and direction of news flow. Users create (and recycle) content on which other users comment and add more content through memes, sharing of links, pictures and videos. Somewhere along the line, the original post (op) may trigger more specific discussions.</p>
<p>The content generated on a news aggregating website like Reddit can thus, theoretically, range across a broad spectrum. From discussions on current technology and sharing of world news to more specific conversations on gardening or anime, the website brings together diverse interests under a singular platform. Topic-based posts and discussions are categorised into subreddits, subcommunities which converge around similar interests. Thus, a subreddit like /r/cricket may serve as a platform for cricket enthusiasts to share news and views on the game. These subreddits together constitute Reddit as a whole. Only registered users can post submissions or comment on other posts, although unregistered users can access the submissions without being able to comment on them. Registered users can upvote and downvote both the posts submitted and the comments posted by other users.</p>
<p>Any registered Reddit user can create a subreddit to initiate submissions and discussions on a particular area of interest. Reddit has a series of default subreddits, including /r/AskReddit, /r/books, /r/history among others. When an unregistered user accesses the website they are likely to see the current top-voted posts from a combination of the default subreddits. The voting system is inextricably linked to visibility: the more the upvotes a post receives, the more likely it is to be top of the list on the self-proclaimed front page of the internet. The posts are thus sorted as a combination of top-voted submissions from an assortment of default subreddits. Comments on specific posts also follow a similar voting logic whereby users can upvote/downvote a specific comment based on how useful or relevant they find it to the original post. Registered users can curate their own page by subscribing to subreddits of their own interest, and unsubscribing from the default ones.</p>
<p>Being a registered user entails choosing a username under which a user’s submissions and comments are collated. Every user comment receives an aggregate score which is the sum of the upvotes and downvotes the comment has received. The cumulative comment scores for every user, called karma, is visible to every other user, and is often an indicator of the level of (in)activity of a specific user. Karma scores are the veritable fiat currency of the reddit space, with prolific users being visible on multiple popular threads attempting to scale their karma aggregate through comments that employ a combination of wit, hyperbole, cliché and outrage.</p>
<p>Reddit with its two-way dynamism—the users are the creators of content and the very people who comment on it—seemingly throws open the spectrum for content to be self-generated and moderated. Every subreddit has a set of moderators who attempt to maintain a modicum of direction amidst the chaos. Moderators are often users who are active on that particular subreddit, or have volunteered (or have been chosen by the subreddit community) to take up the task of maintaining the decorum and coherence of the subreddit. Reddit’s voting system, where users upvote and downvote submitted content, purports to ensure that the cream can constantly float above the morass. The infrastructural logic of Reddit—an algorithm that ensures that posts do not stagnate on the front page and get regularly refreshed by newer content—seeks to instill a participatory ethos where content created/submitted by users gains traction based on the extent of discussion that it generates among other users <strong>[1]</strong>.</p>
<p>A characteristic of the reddit platform is the Ask Me Anything feature where notable individuals set a pre-determined time slot to answer questions raised by users of a subreddit community. The AMA format offers an interesting take on the possibilities of public engagement and publicity in the virtual domain. A unique feature of reddit, the popular AMAs are held on the default /r/IAMA subreddit. The earliest AMAs were coordinated by the founders as well as employees of the website; to an extent this is true even today although in recent times the public relations team of various celebrities have coordinated AMAs for their clients. It remains one of the most popular modes of user engagement, ironically functioning through external, mediated mechanisms. Most AMAs serve a dual purpose: celebrities offer to answer questions when they are ‘in the news’ or when they wish to publicize a new venture, which also serves as an endorsement of the popularity of the reddit platform in reaching out to a wide, primarily North American, audience. An early instance of an acknowledgement of the reach of the reddit platform was an AMA conducted by/for Barack Obama as he sought to be re-elected during the 2012 U.S. Presidential elections. Other notable ‘celebrity’ AMA sessions include those by Bill Gates, Madonna, and Edward Snowden. While celebrity AMAs remain a popular feature, the AMA format itself is utilised even by relatively less established personalities who have their own unique story to share. While /r/IAMA remains the default subreddit used to reach out to the reddit community, specific subreddits often conduct their own AMAs with personalities relevant to the group.</p>
<p>The India subreddit /r/India, the forum for content “directly about India and Indians,” has been a part of Reddit since 2008. At the time of writing this essay there are over 55000 registered Reddit users (including this writer) who subscribe to submissions posted on /r/India. Of course, there may be many more who ‘lurk’ around, a term for those who may not have subscribed but view submissions posted on the subreddit by visiting the subreddit page. /r/India typically draws in over 2 million page views every month. Over time the community has developed a vocabulary of its own, which is often self-referential and draws on submissions and comments that have been made at an earlier time. Many prolific users with characteristic usernames are recognized by fellow users, the sociality perhaps further strengthened through the annual city-based meet-ups that are planned as part of a larger Reddit tradition.</p>
<p>This essay looks at the mobilization of community opinion on /r/India on the issue of net neutrality, the efforts made by some of the users to raise awareness about it, and the ways in which the community responded and reacted to a wider online movement that sought to maintain a more egalitarian approach to Internet access and availability. Drawing on an analysis of a few posts submitted during a period that witnessed a flurry of activity in connection with the debates around net neutrality in India, the essay attempts to sketch out the contours of the debate around the axis of online activity and participation. It seeks to ponder on the extent to which a forum like the India subreddit offers the possibilities of a civic participation, of mobilizing public opinion and contributing to the decisions undertaken by policy makers. How do purportedly diverse online communities interact, draw consensus and stake a claim to the decision-making processes that involve multiple stakeholders often with conflicting interests?</p>
<h3><strong>The Social in the Virtual Rear-view Mirror</strong></h3>
<p>The form of any subreddit, with its defined purpose and rules of submission, ensures a certain coherence even amidst the cornucopia of memes, images and other web links that may be shared and commented upon. The governing logic of a particular subreddit accords it a certain hue, which most users attempt to conform to or occasionally subvert. The specificity of any subreddit, thus, is a mutually constitutive process where the original tech-interface guidelines are negotiated by the content submitted by users of the subreddit.</p>
<img src="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/img/cis-raw_blog_sujeet-george_01.jpeg" alt="Tragedy of India" />
<h6>Source: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/4s5bpn/tragedy_of_india/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/4s5bpn/tragedy_of_india/</a>.</h6>
<p>User behaviour on new media platforms can be understood as a virtual manifestation of traits that are exhibited in the domain of the social in real life. Consider the discussion sparked off by a post that was submitted about 4 weeks back, and which has catapulted to the top of the all time top voted submissions on the subreddit <strong>[2]</strong>. It contrasts the shoddy construction by the Maharashtra government in 2013 of a section of a fort staircase, with the more stable lasting section built by Shivaji in the 17th century. The user who posted the image commented on the dubious nature of infrastructural work in the present day, blaming corruption for the disparity in the quality of work. Juxtaposing historical nostalgia with an apathy about the present state-of-affairs, the comments and discussions around the post veered from questions of the feasibility of implementing older construction methods, to the widespread nepotism and corruption prevalent in public work contracts in the present day. One user remarked, “I'm guessing Shivaji didn't hand out the contracts for building his forts to the lowest bidder.” Another chimed in that “[no] tender is clean. It's often created, mapped, prepared and executed by the company and middleman willing to shell out the most to the bureaucrats and politicians.”</p>
<p>A popular motif on many submissions on /r/India is a lamentation on the tangled mess between the bureaucracy and legislature. It extends the generic urban middle class antipathy towards governance and its deep suspicion of the probity of the administrative processes of the Indian State. One user-comment tried to explain the popularity of the submitted post—a common indicator of content popularity on Reddit is the number of upvotes it receives and the extent of user participation through comments—to the highly ‘relatable’ nature of the submission.</p>
<p>The character of an online forum, while being shaped by diverse user behaviour, is invariably crystallized by the more dominant modes of representation. The anonymity afforded by the online medium and the potential infinitude of the range of submissions should theoretically stretch the spectrum of representations. Yet user behaviour often conforms in a bid to confirm its own shared identity within the group. What is then understood as relatable is not necessarily a universal, but merely an accommodation of difference through consensus. In the following sections I attempt to make sense of the processes through which such a consensus is drawn by considering the trajectory of discussions on posts pertaining to debates on net neutrality <strong>[3]</strong>.</p>
<h3><strong>The Anatomy of an Online Mobilization</strong></h3>
<p>The discussions around questions of net neutrality, Facebook’s Free Basics, differential data pricing, and restricted access to OTT services have captured the Indian public imagination in the last 18-odd months. Multiple consultation papers shared by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) have served as a rallying point for domain experts, media policy analysts and the general public. The series of consultation papers and the questions that have arisen over specific practices of telecom companies are imagined through the essay as a single event punctuated by temporal fissures. It has its own prehistory, a call to arms, and the eventual (fleeting) redemption. The differing discourse around the issue is contextually singular even if separated by chronology.</p>
<p>On February 8 this year, an /r/India user shared a news report about TRAI declaring zero-rated products as illegal <strong>[4]</strong>. Months of collaboration among faceless internet users had managed a key victory in what was repeatedly termed a battle to save the Internet. User comments highlighted the scale of the task accomplished as “a bunch of folks on the Internet [stopped] a $300 billion market cap corporation [Facebook] and a bunch of telecoms with strong lobbying capabilities.” Some users could not see past the irony of the Internet itself serving as a means for the public to halt rapacious tech companies in their stride. The David v/s Goliath analogy seemed apt. The task, though, had just begun, as one user presciently noted: “Mobilizing people is hard. Mobilizing people against a better funded lobby, and on a dry technical topic ? really hard. We are probably going to need a dedicated NGO, mailing lists, donations and members for this and similar issues.”</p>
<p>The debates surrounding net neutrality have sparked a diverse range of questions related to Internet access, differential pricing, restraints on technology, impediments to freedom of expression and questions of consumer choice. The range of issues and stakeholders encompassed within the policy regulation has simultaneously atomised and collectivised the problematic of Internet. As an increasingly everyday technology for many urban Indians, Internet usage has carried the possibility of innovative and easy access to a range of services and information while circumventing hitherto static structures of the administrative machinery. Internet usage in the Indian context can be regarded as both a symbol of egalitarianism and privilege; a conflation of the larger ideal of enterprise espoused by the technological boom and a reluctantly understated reflection of the very technology being of limited wider accessibility. The debates on Internet usage through the very medium thus contains some of the tensions that were echoed in the responses to the questions on net neutrality that were raised on the Indian subreddit.</p>
<p>These debates, circulating across news mediums both print and digital, found their way into the /r/India cosmos through efforts to raise awareness about the issue and to bring about a greater collective bargaining momentum to the efforts in the digital space. A post on December 25, 2014 announced the efforts being undertaken by various media practitioners through the creation of the website <a href="http://netneutrality.in/">http://netneutrality.in/</a> which later became <a href="http://www.savetheinternet.in/">http://www.savetheinternet.in/</a> <strong>[5]</strong>. As a submission in the early life of the net neutrality event the post garnered enough attention to find its way into the vocabulary of the subreddit.</p>
<p>It was, however, not until three months later that perhaps the most comprehensive early exhortation came through a post titled Let's fight for Net Neutrality before it becomes necessary. E-Mail the TRAI now <strong>[6]</strong>. submitted on March 28, 2015 by one of the subreddit moderators. The post called for users to mail the TRAI and join in the efforts to influence upon policy makers on the need for a neutral Internet. User comments ranged from a creating email templates to a brief primer on the meaning and scope of net neutrality. That the public counter fight was still in the planning stage is evident in the numerous user comments volunteering to craft an email template to be sent.</p>
<p>The possibilities of a collaborative enterprise were much more evident in another mod-post, submitted on April 8, 2015 titled <em>Fight for Net Neutrality: The way forward</em> <strong>[7]</strong>. The post assembled the increasing momentum that the net neutrality movement had garnered in the Indian virtual space. Varying email templates to be shared among peer groups were presented, enterprising users created memes and infographics, while more sinister minds listed out companies that openly flouted net neutrality rules. The aim was not just to organise, but to also synchronize the efforts of a purportedly disparate group of users.</p>
<p>Even as user efforts were directed towards raising awareness about net neutrality among a wider audience, the sheer scale of the task and improbable hurdles on the road where highlighted by some. One post speculated on the connection between the timing of TRAI’s consultation paper and the fact that the Director of TRAI was due to retire in May 2015 <strong>[8]</strong>. The user feared that “the decision on TRAI proposal has already been made. The public is asked to comment on the OTT proposal because it is required by norm (not sure about law). They are waiting for Mr Khullar to retire, so they can blame him for the colossal backlash that will happen when the proposal is ratified.”</p>
<p>In the next few months the momentum of the movement ebbed and flowed, with diligent users posting regular updates on the progress. Even as the Internet rights discourse on the forum sought to be balanced with the logic of the market, there emerged a series of reactionary submissions that seemed to combine a distrust of large telecoms with the emancipatory spirit of a virtual civil disobedience.</p>
<h3><strong>Zero Rating the Zero-Rated Apps</strong></h3>
<p>Concurrent with the efforts at the level of governance, /r/India users employed creative means to show their displeasure towards companies who seemed to oppose the tenets of net neutrality. One such instance was when a user galvanised forum opinion to down-rate the Flipkart and Airtel apps on their phones. Flipkart CEO Sachin Bansal’s justification for zero-rated apps as sound business practice was turned inside-out as users gave a zero rating to the Flipkart app on their phones. The impact was ostensibly evident as the daily average ratings for the app saw a sharp fall <strong>[9]</strong>.</p>
<p>Diatribes against telecom companies and their profit-driven enterprise have now become a regular feature on the forum. The mobile network Airtel, which has been at the forefront of the anti-net neutrality lobby, has faced its share of the community ire. Branded Chortel—an (un)imaginative coinage characterizing the supposed thieving policies of the company—the company along with Flipkart has been subject to a series of memes that invoke ridicule and hint at the sense of disconnect between consumers and the products on offer. The image shown above contrasts a popular biscuit brand Parle-G with the recently launched Airtel 4G Internet <strong>[10]</strong>. It employs Parle’s long unblemished reputation as a brand of reliability; its iconicity a signifier of a purported business of ethics that feels anachronistic in comparison to the business practices of the telecom companies.</p>
<img src="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/img/cis-raw_blog_sujeet-george_02.jpeg" alt="Chortel Four-G" />
<h6>Source: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/3r25gr/chortel_four_g/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/3r25gr/chortel_four_g/</a>.</h6>
<p>The movement to generate awareness about Internet policy also sought to initiate dialogues with administrators who are in a position to ensure that the community’s voices are heard. Thus Independent Rajya Sabha member Rajeev Chandrasekhar did an AMA at the height of the net neutrality discussions <strong>[11]</strong>. Since the person doing the AMA can choose to answer or ignore from the range of questions posed by the community, the supposed mutuality of participation is often minimal. Nevertheless, Chandrasekhar’s AMA not just points to the interactive (propagandist) possibilities of reddit or any other social media platform but it also asserts the relevance of the medium as a significant domain where policy regulation impacts people whose voices need to be acknowledged. As an entrepreneur who has previously worked in the technology sector, Chandrasekhar symbolizes /r/India’s imagined ideal scenario of a ‘rule of experts’ in matters of governance. That a sitting MP would seek a dialogue with an online forum also hints at the relevance of such mobilizations, where enterprising tech-savvy politicians understand the potential to stir public action through the domain of the virtual.</p>
<h3><strong>Consensus in/and New Media</strong></h3>
<p>At one level, it could be suggested that the discussions which emerged on the India subreddit around the debates on net neutrality hint at the potentials of virtual mobilization of the public. Social media, the Internet and social networking forums like Reddit could potentially widen the level of information access and dissemination where the early groundwork has been laid by the RTI Act. But at stake in the whole discussion is not merely the extent to which an online community can modify the direction of a policy discourse. Even as the development of a ‘networked public sphere’ has transformed the means of consensus building, the elements of its discontent are difficult to ignore. The formation of a public sphere in a virtual environment presents the possibilities of conformity as much as of consensus.</p>
<p>The discourse around net neutrality on /r/India forum is notable for the wide-ranging consensus that it managed to appropriate from the community. Such a consensus could be interpreted in at least two ways. The form of any subreddit as a forum for all things related to a specific context—be it a common activity, nationality, gender identity—contains within itself the language of adequate acceptance and rebuttal. At the same time, the algorithmic technique of determining the visibility of a post through upvotes and downvotes renders real the possibility of consensus through conformity.</p>
<p>It is more interesting to look beyond the veneer of consensus and question the supposed diversity of the group and its implications, rather than infer collective action as a signifier of the rightness of the action. One could suggest that the terms of the debate, of limiting the control that mega-telecos wield over internet policy in India, offered an easy medium to galvanise opinion on the subreddit. Any nuanced stance will however need to read collective action in relation to the (im)possibility of individual opinion-making in a structured environment of an online forum.</p>
<p>An online platform with a voting system linked to visibility offers a peculiar type of consensus. A majority of the top-voted submissions and comments pertaining to the net neutrality debate on /r/India fall within a broad overlap of consensus linked to a participatory, egalitarian technological ethos which is characteristic of the post-liberalization Indian milieu. The possibility of dissent, or even voicing differing viewpoints, is structured in a limited spectrum since what will be shared/read is inextricably linked to what users understand as acceptable within the forum. Such an understanding can inadvertently suggest a consensus, or worse offer a monochromatic presentation of an issue. This is not to discount the possibility of informed discussion, or exaggerate the ‘hive mind’ of reddit. But the link between visibility and popularity of content often ensures that the nuances of a debate get sidelined and unidimensional. Thus, even though aspects of differential pricing may be understood as a means to wider access, or as a way to open Internet services to the vagaries of the market rather than State whims, such viewpoints find less credibility when articulated within a forum like /r/India <strong>[12]</strong>. While discussions may emerge which consider the issue beyond the limited rhetoric of free speech and consumer choice, they often get presented in the ‘anti net neutrality’ garb or as afterthoughts to a debate the terms of which have ostensibly been settled <strong>[13]</strong>.</p>
<p>Communicative technologies, as Lisa Gitelman notes, often converge around an overlapping mental landscape that seeks to make sense of an act/event through synchronized ontologies of representation. Consensus in such an instance is not to be seen as a final validation of the community’s stance on an issue. It should prompt us to be wary of the pitfalls of online mobilization that could be travelling in an echo chamber. The task then would not be to debunk actions drawn on consensus, but to be aware of the limits of inclusivity of such online forums <strong>[14]</strong>.
Further research has to consider ways in which individual users negotiate the possibility of presenting an individual stance to the community within interface-induced limitations to the possibility of such an enunciation. This would involve interviews with a pool of /r/India users, examine the types of news outlets and viewpoints that gain credence within the community, look at voting patterns, and perhaps undertake a more thorough examination of a wider range of concerns relevant to the community. This essay has attempted a preliminary gesture towards such an endeavour by picking a particular event and the community’s response to it. Reddit, in contrast to Facebook for instance, offers the possibility of peering into an online space where anonymity commingles with community enterprise and the meaning of accountability is extended beyond individual motive of mere sociality or recognition. As such, it could potentially offer an understanding of online behaviour beyond the limits of the individual-liberal paradigm of action orientation and widen the debate on the functioning of social news websites by being acutely aware of the thin line between the individual and the social.</p>
<h3><strong>Disclaimer</strong></h3>
<p>The writer has been a frequent lurker on Reddit, and the India subreddit since 2011. Beyond voraciously consuming the submissions on /r/India he does not claim to have contributed in any meaningful manner to the online discussions referred to in the essay.</p>
<h3><strong>Endnotes</strong></h3>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> The literature on reddit is a fast growing domain, with innovative research looking at Reddit’s voting patterns, user behaviour, and news outlets linked to glean an understanding of the news aggregating website. For an examination of questions of identity and anonymity on Reddit see, Shelton, M., Lo, K., Nardi, B. (2015). Online Media Forums as Separate Social Lives: A Qualitative Study of Disclosure Within and Beyond Reddit. In iConference 2015 Proceedings. For an engagement with questions on what motivates Reddit user to contribute see, Bogers, T., & Nordenhoff Wernersen, R. (2014). How 'Social' are Social News Sites? Exploring the Motivations for Using Reddit.com. In Proceedings of the iConference 2014. (pp. 329-344). IDEALS: iSchools.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/4s5bpn/tragedy_of_india/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/4s5bpn/tragedy_of_india/</a>. Last accessed on August 2, 2016. Unless stated otherwise, all links posted hereafter have also been accessed on the same day.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> My understanding of social media and the social dimension of new media has been shaped from my reading of Dijck, José Van. <em>The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media</em>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. For an examination of social media practices see, Ellison, N. B. & boyd, d. (2013). Sociality through Social Network Sites. In Dutton, W. H. (Ed.), <em>The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies</em>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 151–172.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a>https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/44qddb/trai_to_make_zero_rated_products_illegal/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/2qcvhp/i_created_a_site_to_educate_people_about_airtel/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/2qcvhp/i_created_a_site_to_educate_people_about_airtel/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/30lz1p/lets_fight_for_net_neutrality_before_it_becomes/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/30lz1p/lets_fight_for_net_neutrality_before_it_becomes/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/31vvf2/fight_for_net_neutrality_the_way_forward/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/31vvf2/fight_for_net_neutrality_the_way_forward/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/322iv8/trai_asking_for_feedback_on_their_proposal_is_a/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/322iv8/trai_asking_for_feedback_on_their_proposal_is_a/</a>. For Kullar’s own views on the issue, see: <a href="http://thewire.in/1624/lets-be-practical-about-net-neutrality/">http://thewire.in/1624/lets-be-practical-about-net-neutrality/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/31ykxj/flipkart_and_airtel_are_fucking_with_your/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/31ykxj/flipkart_and_airtel_are_fucking_with_your/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/3r25gr/chortel_four_g/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/3r25gr/chortel_four_g/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/387req/hi_rindia_i_am_rajeev_chandrasekhar_member_of/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/387req/hi_rindia_i_am_rajeev_chandrasekhar_member_of/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[12]</strong> CIS’s note on its position on net neutrality points to the multilayered nature of the policy: <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-position-on-net-neutrality'>http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-position-on-net-neutrality</a>. Last accessed on September 9, 2016. For a contrarian voice, see: <a href=">http://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/net-neutrality-war-is-not-just-facebook-versus-internet-mullahs/story-s9eZpZnomaaiz4De8fYfaK.html</a>. Last accessed on September 9, 2016.</p>
<p><strong>[13]</strong> Consider the discussions that emerged in two separate posts: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/31peb4/lets_respond_to_this_anti_net_neutrality_piece/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/31peb4/lets_respond_to_this_anti_net_neutrality_piece/</a> and <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/336u8f/woke_up_to_this_pro_internetorg_article_in/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/336u8f/woke_up_to_this_pro_internetorg_article_in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[14]</strong> Gitelman, Lisa. <em>Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture</em>. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Especially chapter 3.</p>
<h3><strong>Author Profile</strong></h3>
<p>Sujeet George has an M.Phil from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. His research interests are in histories of science and commodities, and new media and digital humanities. He has previously worked with the Mumbai City Museum and The Southasia Trust.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_mobilizing-online-consensus-net-neutrality-and-the-india-subreddit'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_mobilizing-online-consensus-net-neutrality-and-the-india-subreddit</a>
</p>
No publisherSujeet GeorgeRedditInternet StudiesRAW BlogNet NeutralityResearchers at Work2016-09-27T04:52:35ZBlog EntryLove in the Time of Tinder
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-october-2-2016-nishant-shah-love-in-the-time-of-tinder
<b>Service providers and information aggregators mine our information and share it in ways that we cannot imagine.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article was <a class="external-link" href="http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/social/love-in-the-time-of-tinder-3059643/">published in the Indian Express</a> on October 2, 2016.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Last week, I met somebody who narrated their digital fairy tale to me. He was waiting in between trains, waiting at a train station, for the connection to arrive. Bored, he opened the dating app Tinder. He swiped right. There was a match. They started chatting. The conversation became interesting. She offered to leave work early and come to the train station to meet him for coffee. They had a five-hour long date. He missed many connections and stayed back with her to spend more time. When he left, they stayed connected using all the digital apps of connection that you can imagine. They started travelling weekends to be with each other. Three years later, he moved countries and jobs to be in the same city as her. Last week, they got engaged to be married. And everybody raised a toast to the resilience of their love, and how they have worked hard at being together. They thanked all the people who have been involved and supportive in helping them through this period. And at the end, she said, she wanted to thank Tinder and WhatsApp, without which they would have never met been able to continue this connection. They were being facetious, but they were also reminding us that we live in appified times.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Apps are everywhere and they have become so natural and ubiquitous that we have forgotten what it means to live without them. In the case of this fairy tale couple, their very meeting was ordained not by fate and destiny and romantic godmothers, but by a smart app. This app, based on algorithms that judged them to be a good match, drawing from what they like on Facebook and what they share with their friends, presented both of them to each other, causing the first swipe. The app, designed around the principle of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), made sure that in the 40 minutes that he was at the train station, both of them looked at their phones, swiped right and had the conversation that began it all. The app created habits that ensured that they trusted each other to meet after a 20-minute chat, to miss trains for the joy of the first extended date. People fell in love, and their love was managed entirely by smart apps.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">These apps are designed to assist us in our mundane lives. Behind their seductive design and intuitive interfaces are scripts, norms, rules, protocols and intentions that are influenced and shaped by corporations and individuals, who have a specific interest in expanding their market domains. The creation of profiles on Tinder required both these people to give Tinder access to a wide variety of their personal activities and profiles. As their romance progressed, they involved more apps in their activities. Personal planners, reminders, e-shopping platforms, social media testimonies, deals to buy cheap tickets — all came into play. And even as they came together in a monogamous relationship, the apps encouraged them into data infidelity, wantonly sharing their data, making it speak with strangers, interact with unknown shadows in the dark, morphing and fusing with predatory algorithms that continued to not only follow them but also predict what their needs are. These smart apps might come with friendly interfaces and helpful suggestions, but they do it by making us transparent — they mine our information and distribute and share it in ways that we cannot imagine to ends that we cannot fathom.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As the apps become a daily part of our lives, holding our hands and comforting our souls, it is good to remember that behind the apps is a pipeline of service providers, data harvesters, information aggregators, who are learning more and more about us, and then without our consent, in the guise of being helpful, are sharing those secrets with things and people we do not know.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While they do help us celebrate the moments and make beautiful human connections, they also continue to make oily suggestions and innuendos, gently guiding us into buying more and consuming more. I came home from the engagement party and woke up the next morning with my face being tagged in about 30 pictures on four different social media apps. And each app suggested different things I can do to celebrate this event — buy a new suit for the wedding, buy an engagement gift for the happy couple, get help with planning a bachelor’s party, and get the services of a wedding planning app.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-october-2-2016-nishant-shah-love-in-the-time-of-tinder'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-october-2-2016-nishant-shah-love-in-the-time-of-tinder</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at WorkRAW Blog2016-10-17T02:07:05ZBlog EntryDigital native: Lie Me a River
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-march-19-2017-digital-native-lie-me-a-river
<b>The sea of social media around us often drowns the truth, exchanging misinformation for facts.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img alt="Social media, Fake news, Fake messages on WhatsApp, Fake news problem, Snopes, Facebook, Google, WhatsApp forwards, technology, tech culture, tech news" class="size-full wp-image-4574844" src="http://images.indianexpress.com/2017/03/fakenews_big_1.jpg" style="float: none; " /><br /><span class="discreet">This basic process of truth telling loses all affordance in social media practices. Let me channel my inner school teacher and present you with a question.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">One of the most common methods of testing a student’s knowledge is the multiple choice question template that asks the examinee to identify one of four options as correct solutions to a problem. The pedagogic principle behind these questions is simple enough: We live in a world where truth and accuracy are important. No matter what our subjective feelings, impressions, memories or instincts might be, we need to rely on verifiable facts to make a truth claim. If we fail to do so, there would be negative consequences.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This basic process of truth telling loses all affordance in social media practices. Let me channel my inner school teacher and present you with a question. Drawing on samples of WhatsApp messages on my social media feeds, I invite you to answer this simple question: Which of these statements is not true?</p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify; "> Drinking from disposable paper cups lined with wax to keep the liquid from seeping leads to wax deposits in your stomach, resulting in fatal health risks.</li>
<li>Beverages in India have been contaminated by the Ebola virus and are on our shelves right now.</li>
<li>According to Ayurveda, burning camphor and cardamom together kills the swine flu virus in air.</li>
<li>Bollywood actor <a href="http://indianexpress.com/about/farida-jalal">Farida Jalal</a> is dead.</li>
</ol>
<p><iframe frameborder="0" height="260" scrolling="auto" src="http://vidshare.indianexpress.com/players/FrunroOr-xe0BVfqu.html" width="320"></iframe></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Of all of these, the only one you can verify is that Farida Jalal is not dead. The reason we know it for sure is because, she had to come to Twitter, and like Oscar Wilde, announce that the rumours of her death were wildly exaggerated. As Jalal herself pointed out in an interview, she was harassed by a barrage of phone calls, of people calling her up to ask her (oh, the irony!) if she was dead. The other three claims are right now floating in the air, ready to settle down as truth, with continuous repetition. We cannot be sure that they are inaccurate. Especially because they don’t just come as one-line headlines but long narratives of imaginary proofs.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Why have we reached this post-truth moment? Why have our social media feeds become minefields of dubious information masquerading as lies? There are many laments lately about how this lack of veracity and fact-checking is becoming the new normal and the blame is always put on either the media that promotes accelerated spread of messages without space for reflection, or gullible people who do not pause to think about the ludicrousness of the message before they spread it to their groups. And, while it is necessary to develop a critical literacy to make sure that we understand the responsibility of our role as information circulators and curators, there is one dimension that needs to be explored more — trust.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In our pre-digital knowledge practices, when information came with a signature, we believed that somebody had done the due diligence needed for the information to be published. An author’s book was supported by the rigour of the publisher behind it. A news report was fact-checked by verifiers who are employed precisely to do that. Information from a friend or somebody we know was credible because of our assessment of the person’s expertise and knowledge. We have always been able to determine the source of information, and our proximity with the source allowed us to trust the information that came through it.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, with social media, this relationship has changed. When somebody sends us a message on WhatsApp, it is still coming from a source that we know, but we have to realise that this source is not producing or verifying this information, but merely circulating it. Messages come with a signature, they seem to emerge from people we know and trust, and, hence, we presume that they have done the due diligence required before passing on the information.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It is important to realise that within the social web we don’t really parse, analyse or process information, we merely pass and distribute it. This is how digital media perceives its users — as information circulators. And, this means, that information which mimics facts but is blatantly false, finds easy prey. So, the next time you come across information on these endless message groups, ask a simple question before you pass it along: no matter what the message claims, can you actually locate the source of the information? Is the person who forwards that message producing the information or merely sharing it? If they are sharing it, get back to them and ask how they know what they know. We trust things that are authored, but in our social apps, people are not authors, they are circulators. Making the distinction between the two might be the first step towards developing a critical literacy for fact-telling on the digital web.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Nishant Shah is a professor of new media and the co-founder of The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore.</i></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-march-19-2017-digital-native-lie-me-a-river'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-march-19-2017-digital-native-lie-me-a-river</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at WorkRAW BlogDigital Natives2017-03-19T14:47:16ZBlog EntryDatafication of the Public Distribution System in India
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/datafication-of-the-public-distribution-system-in-india
<b>In this study, we look into the datafication of social protection schemes with a special focus on the Public Distribution System in India. Proponents of datafication claim that the benefits will reach the right person and curb leakages through the automation and digitisation of all PDS processes. Aadhaar is the most important link in the datafication; supporters claim that it makes technology people-centric. This study looks at the status of PDS datafication and its impact on the delivery of the scheme in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. We also try to understand to what extent the stated objective of portability has been met and how far the challenges faced by the rights holders of the PDS have been resolved. </b>
<p>Read the full report <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/datafication-of-the-public-distribution-system-in-india-pdf" class="internal-link">here</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/datafication-of-the-public-distribution-system-in-india'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/datafication-of-the-public-distribution-system-in-india</a>
</p>
No publisherSameet PandaRAW ResearchFeaturedResearchers at WorkRAW Blog2024-02-12T12:07:40ZBlog EntryDesigning Domestic Work Platforms
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/apc-cis-divyansha-sehgal-yathrath-designing-domestic-work-platforms
<b>This research was conducted by The Center for Internet and Society (CIS) with funding from Association for Progressive Communication (APC) through the Feminist Internet Research Network (FIRN), supported by International Development Research Centre (IDRC). The authors are deeply grateful to the platform workers who talked to us and shared their experiences of finding work through Urban Company. Their responses shaped our research and their insights guided the creation of this final report.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), there are between 20 million and 80 million workers engaged in domestic work in India. Domestic work has traditionally been an informal sector with customers and workers depending on local and community networks to be connected with each other. Over the last few years, digital platforms have gained ground in connecting domestic workers with tech-savvy urban dwellers.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">These platforms promise customers the ease and convenience of moving yet another aspect of their lives online, while they promise to give workers more flexibility, control over their time and increased earnings.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, we show that this introduction of technology brings with itself the same problems that haunt other sectors of platform-mediated gig work. On-demand platforms seek to exert control over most points of the service delivery process, including job distributions, client selection, worker pay and performance evaluation, all the while relegating workers to an independent contractor status.</p>
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<p>Click to download the <b><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/designing-domestic-work-platforms/at_download/file" class="external-link">full report</a></b></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/apc-cis-divyansha-sehgal-yathrath-designing-domestic-work-platforms'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/apc-cis-divyansha-sehgal-yathrath-designing-domestic-work-platforms</a>
</p>
No publisherDivyansha Sehgal and YathrathResearchers at WorkRAW BlogDomestic Work2022-08-13T06:31:47ZBlog EntryIndic Scripts and the Internet
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_indic-scripts-and-the-internet
<b>This post by Dibyajyoti Ghosh is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Dibyajyoti is a PhD student in the Department of English, Jadavpur University. He has four years of full-time work experience in projects which dealt with digital humanities and specially with digitisation of material in Indic scripts. In this essay, Dibyajyoti explores the effects the English language has on the Internet population of India.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Internet Usage Statistics in India</h2>
<p>According to the latest statistics [1], while the rural mobile tele-density in India is 47.78%, the urban tele-density for mobile phones is 143.08% (which means, more than one registered SIM card per person and this phenomenon is thus also reflected in the rural figures). On the other hand, roughly only 6.5% of the population has access to ‘broadband’ Internet (>= 512 kbps) through a phone or a dongle and only 1.23% has access to a wired-broadband connection. However, roughly 20% of India’s population is roughly connected to the Internet [2]. Thus, roughly 12% of the population has access to low-speed Internet. What these figures do not reveal is the quantum of consumption of data. It can be safely assumed given the comparatively high costs of mobile Internet usage and the difficult method of feeding large tracts of data through a mobile phone, that the quantum of consumption is significantly higher in the case of computer Internet users as opposed to mobile users. Though as these statistics reveal, the chances of India being connected to the Internet depends largely on mobile phones, rather than desktop/ laptop computers.</p>
<p>Thus, the status of the Internet in India is still that of a niche medium. Other than the cost-factor of having access to a device which can access the Internet and paying for the Internet data package, some other factors also hinder the growth of the Internet in India. One of them is the issue of language. Whereas the 1990s saw an over-domination of English on the Internet given the linguistic communities which were developing the world of computers and the world of the Internet [3], by 2015, some of the disparity with offline linguistic patterns has been reduced [4]. However, for Indic scripts, much less development has taken place. If one is studying the Internet in India, chances are one is studying it in English.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Languages the Indian Internet User Encounters Both Online and Offline</h2>
<p>What does this hold for the future of these Indic scripts? Given the multi-lingual skills of Indian school-goers and the increasing amount of daily reading time of those connected to the Internet (which is somewhere between 12% and 20% of the population) being devoted to reading on the Internet, chances are reading is increasingly in English.</p>
<p>The importance of English-language skills in India, as indeed in the rest of the world, in 2015 is undeniable [5]. English is also a signifier of class in India. However, despite the three-language policy adopted by schools, schools which offer courses primarily in other Indian languages suffer from an inherent disadvantage that students face when these students enter colleges and universities where the medium of teaching is usually English, and later on take up jobs which require official reports to be written in English. Thus, Indian languages other than English offer much less incentive for parents and students to encourage their study. Whereas oral conversation among the Indian population is largely conducted in languages other than English, written conversation is increasingly being conducted in English. Language is not only a political issue but also a subject of social study, not to mention the issues of linguistics. The larger socio-political issues of language are perhaps too vast to be discussed in connection to Indic scripts and the Internet. Thus, apart from this basic point about the bias towards English, I am not delving into it further.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Indic Script Software and Data Entry</h2>
<p>Let me start with discussing natively-digital material. In the digital domain, entering text in Indic scripts is a difficult task. Indic scripts are primarily abugida scripts, which are writing systems ‘in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as a unit: each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary’ [6]. This contrasts with the Latin script used to write English, in which vowels have status equal to consonants, and with abjad scripts such as the script used to write Arabic, in which vowel marking is absent or optional. Similar difficulty is also encountered in entering texts in other non-Latin scripts such as Chinese. Mandarin Chinese may be the world’s most-spoken language and China may be one of the software and hardware giants, but supposedly even Chinese is not particularly amenable to the Internet [7]. Entering Indic scripts on a computer is difficult because it usually involves the addition of new software or tweaking existing software which is slightly difficult for the novice/ casual user.</p>
<p>ISIS, developed by Gautam Sengupta of the University of Hyderabad and sponsored by the Government of India, is an early example of Indic script input software [8]. It is available online for free. It is not fully phonetic. iLEAP, developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), a Government of India funded agency, is now no longer extant but CDAC have produced other input software thereafter. Google too offers an Indic language input tool now [9]. For languages such as Bengali, there have been software such as Bijoy, which was made by Mustafa Jabbar of Ananda Computers, Dhaka, Bangladesh, and is sold commercially [10] and the free softwares BanglaWord and Avro. Avro was created in 2003 by Mehdi Hasan Khan of Mymensingh, Bangladesh, and subsequently developed by a team at Omicron Lab, Dhaka [11]. Such software exists for other individual Indic languages. Operating systems such as Windows [12] and Ubuntu [13] offer Indic script input as well, and make use of the InScript keyboard [14] too.</p>
<p>When it comes to mobile phones, prior to the introduction of touchscreen smartphones, text messaging had little option to use the Indic script. With the introduction of multiple keyboards in touchscreen smartphones, there are a few options to use the Indic script. Both Android and iOS offer Indic script keyboards. Yet these are even less easy to use than computer keyboards as one needs to toggle between several sets of keyboards to access all the characters required for Indic script input. Google has recently started handwriting input which supports Indic scripts [15]. It remains to be seen how much the feature is used.</p>
<p>In spite of this availability of input tools in recent years, the most common method of entering Indic language is through transliteration. Just like Pinyin for the Chinese script, Indic scripts too have official transliteration standards. <em>The Indian National Bibliography</em> (Kolkata: Central Reference Library, 2004) maintains one such standard. However, such transliteration mechanisms require diacritical marks, which are again difficult to enter. Thus, more often than not, these transliteration standards are not followed except when one is maintaining strict academic standards.</p>
<p>The point that I am trying to make is that despite the availability of tools for entering Indic scripts and even well-defined standards for transliterating Indic words in the Latin script, neither is universally followed. The reason is it involves extra labour, as opposed to simple transliteration without any standards. Thus, what often one ends up with in casual written communication (which outnumbers formal written communication by a wide margin) in the digital domain, be it in the form of SMSes, messages in Whatsapp or other instant messaging applications or emails, is Indic words in non-standard transliteration into the Latin alphabet. The introduction of SMS lingo and standards two decades back had already prepared the way for the wider acceptance of Indic words in non-standard transliteration into the Latin alphabet. When one comes to a semi-casual/ semi-formal medium, such as blogs and social networks, where the receiver of the message is usually more than one, the forms of expression are slightly different.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Mimetic Desires on Public Platforms</h2>
<p>Digital, crowd-sourced public platforms, such as blogs and largely social networks, offer a different kind of discourse. On the one hand, private habits spill into the public realm. Thus, Indic words in non-standard transliteration into the Latin alphabet are a common practice. On the other hand, the public nature of such platforms offers a space for a kind of mimetic desire. Despite the availability of the user-interface of the most commonly accessed sites such as Gmail and Facebook in Indic languages, most prefer to retain their user-interface in the default English mode [16]. It is a different issue that enabling browsers to render Indic scripts correctly is often a difficult task and sometimes despite following every instruction in the manual, the problem remains unsolved. The overall English language and English script overdose on social networks such as Facebook generate a kind of desire to mingle in with the crowd. Thus, instead of typing Indic words in non-standard transliteration into the Latin alphabet, the data entered is actually more often than not in English. Often, other than formal job reports and letters, social networks are the only platform that a lot of Indians get where they can produce verbal communication in English. Thus, in addition to a mimetic desire to fit in with the English-writing crowd, social networks also offer a semi-public platform to write one’s thoughts in English, a platform which for a lot of Indians was perhaps last available to them when they had to write essays for their compulsory English-language paper in high school. Both of these desires further hamper the incentive to write on the Internet using Indic scripts.</p>
<p>Blogs occupy a space somewhere in between formal websites and casual for-the-nonce social network posts. Both the structure of blogs (more structured than a social network but less structured than a website) and the status of blogs lie somewhere in between these two major platforms. Also, with the rise of social networks, the rate of growth of blogs has decreased. Thus, blogs are usually less popular than both websites as well as social networks. On blogs, the content is usually more formal, as is the presentation. Also, the mimetic desire generated by a social network is perhaps less heightened in the case of blogs. Blogs present a more one-to-many approach as opposed to a social network which largely presents a many-to-many structure.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Spelling Skills in Indic Languages</h2>
<p>At the other hand of the social class in India, is the class which went to an English-medium school and writes predominantly in English. Oral communication is often carried out in other Indian languages but these languages are not often used for written communication. Even when casual written communication in the digital domain, such as SMSes and other instant messaging applications or emails, is carried out using Indic words, it is in non-standard transliteration into the Latin alphabet. For this class, the problem is the lack of exposure to reading and writing in Indian languages other than English. Thus, even this minimal writing in transliteration mode may further weaken their spelling skills in these Indian languages.</p>
<p>There are of course other categories into which one can group Internet users in India. The equally strong multi-lingual Indian, the equally weak multi-lingual Indian and the Indian strong in one language are three such categories. Irrespective of which class the Indian Internet user belongs to, the Internet user’s exposure to material written in Indic scripts on the Internet is low. So far I have discussed natively-digital resources.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Digitisation of Pre-Digital Resources</h2>
<p>Let me now turn to digitsation of pre-digital resources. Digitisation of such resources is a task involving a lot of money and labour. There are several organisations in India which are involved in such tasks. The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) is one such organisation. The School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University, Kolkata is another such organisation [17]. The Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata too is actively involved in digitisation of such material [18]. The West Bengal Public Library repository on Dspace [19] and the Digital Library of India [20] are also significant repositories, as is the portal of the National Archives of India, titled Abhilekh Patal [21]. There are some digital archives focussed on the output of a specific person, such as the MK Gandhi portal [22]. There have been a few instances of making public searchable text files from such digitised material, such as those by the Society for Natural Language Technology Research [23] and Bichitra: Online Tagore Variorum [24]. Other digitisation programmes are in progress, such as the long-running National Mission for Manuscripts [25]. Yet, in spite of this, such efforts are miniscule compared to databases, albeit commercial and not open-access, such as Early English Books Online or Eighteenth Century Collections Online. The Internet, while it offers the opportunity for an equitable digitisation of pre-digital resources in English as well as Indic scripts, does not contain as many resources in Indic scripts as it does in the Latin script. The reasons are because whereas Indic script resources are primarily digitised by Indian organisations where the money needed for such tasks is not available in great amounts, resources in English are digitised from a number of economies with a high per capita GDP. Given the more basic needs of enhancing the reach and level of primary, secondary and tertiary education in the country, an economy with a low per capita GDP such as India does not have the financial means to digitise vast quantities of pre-digital resources, be they in the Latin script or in Indic scripts.</p>
<p>When it comes to electronic books in Indic scripts, the refusal of major platforms such as Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing to list books in Indic scripts [26] is a major barrier for individuals to create e-books in Indic scripts. Whereas most major newspapers in Indic scripts have online editions, the case is not so for major book publishers. Unlike a newspaper which primarily relies on advertising for its revenue, book publishers depend on book sales. There is no infrastructure in place for selling electronic books in Indic scripts. The publishers perhaps also feel that the market for consumption of e-books in such languages is not of a significant scale, and thus do not feel incentivised enough to encourage the creation of e-books. Thus, the entire Kindle reading population in India (which is not very large in the first place [27]) is deprived of the chance of buying e-books in Indic scripts. If they read e-books in Indic scripts on Kindles and tablets, then such e-books are usually pirated scanned copies. There are some sites which make available pirated scanned copies of books printed in Indic scripts. However, such sites and the number of such books is so small, that they make no major dent to the revenues of the Indic-languages publishing industry.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Effects on the Indian Internet User</h2>
<p>As a result, casual Indian Internet researchers and readers often depend on material written in English instead of material written in Indic languages. It is true that the serious researcher will of course make the effort of visiting physical libraries and archives to access books in Indic languages. But for casual reading and research, it is too much of a trouble. For such Internet users, not only are undigitised Indic verbal texts invisible, but the lack of engagement with such texts lead to the effacement of such texts from the public discourse and domain.</p>
<p>For Indian school students studying in schools where the medium of instruction is not English, the absence of such texts from the Internet means that they engage less with the Internet for academic purposes. For them, the Internet becomes more of a resource meant for non-academic purposes if they have trouble reading texts in English. It is true that English is one of the three languages that school students learn yet as the state of education goes, it is not fully satisfactory [28]. On the other hand, given the English language and English script overdose on social networks, the mimetic desire forces students to generate texts in English, not only the script but also the language. As a result, what is generated is often English of a less than satisfactory standard. A political strain of thought treats the language that people generate as ‘the language’. Measuring such an output against other standards of English is considered politically incorrect. In fact, the regional acceptance of such local sub-groups of English has led to the wider acceptance of English and its growing presence across the world. Yet, as the notion of class in India based on the command over English shows, such sub-grouping also leads to the creation of separate classes.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Effects of the Internet on Indic Scripts</h2>
<p>Does the Internet alleviate or exacerbate the problem caused by the hierarchy of English over other Indic languages? I guess that the answer is not a simple nod in either direction. On the other hand, I conclude that the Internet increases the mimetic desire to generate written communication in English. Failure to communicate in English according to certain standards of English further exacerbates the creation of the classes based on the command over English. While the Internet, to a certain extent, helps in improving English spelling skills owing to a greater exposure to English, at the same time, it leads to a greater deterioration in spelling skills in Indic languages. Owing to the lack of availability of pre-digital resources in Indic scripts in the digital domain, there is a slow effacement of such resources from the public discourse at large.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Possible Measures to Enhance the Status of Indic Scripts on the Internet</h2>
<p>These are some of the effects that the Internet in India has had on Indic scripts. Given that the Internet is a niche medium and those shaping the general discourse are more likely to have access to the Internet in the first place, the low visibility of Indic scripts on the Internet is a cause for concern. However, it is true that with the growing accessibility of the Internet in India, the resources in Indic scripts are bound to increase. It is perhaps dependent primarily on those in power, such as the central and state governments to ensure that their websites and mobile phone applications are in Indic scripts as well and the Indic script versions of their digital resources do not lack any feature of the English-language version of such resources. The private sector, especially the publishing industry also needs to create a market for electronic publication in Indic scripts. Just like e-commerce in India did not come after the entire infrastructure was in place, but rather the infrastructure kept building up as e-commerce kept growing, similarly the publishing industry also needs to create a digital Indic-script market, and then keep building it up. E-commerce, which perhaps has the greatest incentive to build resources, can also significantly alter the scenario by offering e-commerce in Indic scripts. Snapdeal has very limited components of their website in two Indic scripts. Other major e-commerce companies have not followed suit and neither is Snapdeal’s inclusion particularly effective. Yet, as the Flipkart-owned apparel company Myntra’s recent decision to go app-only and completely do away with their website has shown, e-commerce has its ways of incentivising customers to change their habits in a drastic manner. It is with such hope that I would have liked to end this brief essay on studying the Internet in India. Yet, as the language of this essay shows, such hopes are not particularly strong, as most scholarly writing in India on the Internet continues to be in English. Scholarly journals and research platforms in Indic scripts on the Internet continue to be so limited in number that it is hard to find particularly high-impact publications from among them. If one is studying the Internet in India, chances are one is both studying and writing in English.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Endnotes</h2>
<p>[1] <a href="http://www.trai.gov.in/WriteReadData/PressRealease/Document/PR-34-TSD-Mar-12052015.pdf">http://www.trai.gov.in/WriteReadData/PressRealease/Document/PR-34-TSD-Mar-12052015.pdf</a></p>
<p>[2] <a href="http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users-by-country">http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users-by-country</a></p>
<p>[3] Daniel Pimienta, Daniel Prado and Álvaro Blanco, Twelve years of measuring linguistic diversity in the Internet: balance and perspectives, UNESCO publications for the World Summit on the Information Society (2009), <a href="http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001870/187016e.pdf">http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001870/187016e.pdf</a></p>
<p>[4] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers</a></p>
<p>[5] <a href="https://hbr.org/2012/05/global-business-speaks-english">https://hbr.org/2012/05/global-business-speaks-english</a></p>
<p>[6] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida</a></p>
<p>[7] <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117608/chinese-number-websites-secret-meaning-urls">http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117608/chinese-number-websites-secret-meaning-urls</a></p>
<p>[8] <a href="http://isis.keymankeyboards.com/">http://isis.keymankeyboards.com/</a></p>
<p>[9] <a href="http://www.google.com/inputtools/">http://www.google.com/inputtools/</a></p>
<p>[10] <a href="http://www.bijoyekushe.net/">http://www.bijoyekushe.net/</a></p>
<p>[11] <a href="https://www.omicronlab.com/">https://www.omicronlab.com/</a></p>
<p>[12] <a href="http://www.bhashaindia.com/ilit/">http://www.bhashaindia.com/ilit/</a></p>
<p>[13] <a href="https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ibus">https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ibus</a></p>
<p>[14] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InScript_keyboard">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InScript_keyboard</a></p>
<p>[15] <a href="http://googleresearch.blogspot.in/2015/04/google-handwriting-input-in-82.html">http://googleresearch.blogspot.in/2015/04/google-handwriting-input-in-82.html</a></p>
<p>[16] There is no open-access data for this from either Google or Facebook. Third-parties conduct such studies. A study can be found here: <a href="http://www.oneskyapp.com/blog/top-10-languages-with-most-users-on-facebook/">http://www.oneskyapp.com/blog/top-10-languages-with-most-users-on-facebook/</a></p>
<p>[17] <a href="http://www.jaduniv.edu.in/view_department.php?deptid=135">http://www.jaduniv.edu.in/view_department.php?deptid=135</a></p>
<p>[18] <a href="http://www.savifa.uni-hd.de/thematicportals/urban_history.html">http://www.savifa.uni-hd.de/thematicportals/urban_history.html</a></p>
<p>[19] <a href="http://dspace.wbpublibnet.gov.in:8080/jspui/">http://dspace.wbpublibnet.gov.in:8080/jspui/</a></p>
<p>[20] <a href="http://www.dli.ernet.in/">http://www.dli.ernet.in/</a></p>
<p>[21] <a href="http://www.abhilekh-patal.in/">http://www.abhilekh-patal.in/</a></p>
<p>[22] <a href="https://www.gandhiheritageportal.org/">https://www.gandhiheritageportal.org/</a></p>
<p>[23] <a href="http://www.nltr.org/">http://www.nltr.org/</a></p>
<p>[24] <a href="http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/index.php">http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/index.php</a></p>
<p>[25] <a href="http://www.namami.org/index.htm">http://www.namami.org/index.htm</a></p>
<p>[26] <a href="https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A9FDO0A3V0119">https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A9FDO0A3V0119</a></p>
<p>[27] <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/Ebook-readers-fail-to-kindle-sales-in-India/articleshow/45802786.cms">http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/Ebook-readers-fail-to-kindle-sales-in-India/articleshow/45802786.cms</a></p>
<p>[28] Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) 2014, facilitated by Pratham, pp. 81-82, 86, 88-89, <a href="http://img.asercentre.org/docs/Publications/ASER%20Reports/ASER%202014/fullaser2014mainreport_1.pdf">http://img.asercentre.org/docs/Publications/ASER%20Reports/ASER%202014/fullaser2014mainreport_1.pdf</a></p>
<p> </p>
<p><em>The post is published under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International</a> license, and copyright is retained by the author.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_indic-scripts-and-the-internet'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_indic-scripts-and-the-internet</a>
</p>
No publisherDibyajyoti GhoshLanguageRAW BlogIndic ComputingResearchers at WorkIndic Scripts2015-07-10T04:23:35ZBlog EntryUsers and the Internet
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_users-and-the-internet
<b>This post by Purbasha Auddy is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Purbasha is a SYLFF PhD fellow at the School of Cultural Texts and Records (SCTR), Jadavpur University, with more than eight years of work experience in digital archiving. She has also been teaching for the last two years in the newly-started post-graduate diploma course in Digital Humanities and Cultural Informatics offered by the SCTR. In this essay, Purbasha explores the constructions of the ideas of the Indian Internet users through the advertisements that talk about data packages, mobile phones or apps.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><iframe src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/rg37kafMsWk?rel=0" frameborder="0" height="360" width="640"></iframe></p>
<p>A baby [1] is refusing to be born as (as we learn later, ‘his’) parents cannot afford high-speed internet for smartphones but wi-fi plans offered by an internet service provider satisfy the baby as if the baby is being born for the internet.</p>
<p>The baby [2] comes out of the womb, searches the net on a smartphone, cuts his own umbilical cord, takes a selfie with the nurse, opens every possible social media- account, takes his blue baby boy balloons and finds his own way out of the building leaving behind dumbstruck parents.</p>
<p>The two unreal situations that are described above are the two storylines of two advertisements of the same company trying to sell an internet connection. No, this article will not talk about the aesthetic appeal of these ads, but will look into such creative ways to locate the explanation of the internet and its users instead; to be precise internet and its Indian users.</p>
<p>The two ads described at the beginning do not show any Indian-ness but makes the viewer wonder about how far this ‘born for the internet’ baby can travel with an internet-enabled smartphone. Are these two ads trying to define the internet as a smart product or are they trying to classify the users of the internet rather as smart? Moreover how does one define the internet? It means more than a conglomeration of networks. At this point as I am trying to coin a definition of the internet on my own, my thought-process is occupied with the activities I do on the net but I fail to define it.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>A personal note…</h2>
<p>In 1995, when VSNL launched the internet in India, I was 10, and engrossed in story books and comics. As I was growing up, I was discovering the world around through books, television, radio and newspapers. I was totally unaware of the practicality of the internet and it remained a fact of general knowledge. Not only me! Not a single friend of mine happened to use the internet or discussed keenly about it. My school did not offer a computer course either. After my +10 board exam, I requested (read demanded) my parents to enroll me in a computer training center which was near my house and had a government affiliation. I learnt basics of computer applications, the programming language Foxpro and basics of the internet. I even got to know how to create a basic webpage. Only when I was required to write a dissertation for my graduation, did I start going to a cyber café to type my dissertation and surf the internet. My parents were really apprehensive about what I was doing in a cyber café which was costing 30 rupees per hour!</p>
<p>Though my parents are still uneasy with the fact that ‘my generation’ remains glued to the internet most of the time, they are amazed on the other hand; how we do net banking, shop online, study, Facebook, exchange email, call a cab or order pizza etc. from the internet. They are happy to remain on the other side of the digital divide.</p>
<p>It has been twenty years that the Indian society has seen the ‘wrong side’ of the internet like hacking, phishing and other grave matters related to social networks. India is a complex society and so is the internet. But India, being the one of the largest potential markets, various services related to the internet are encouraging the probable consumers. Through the advertisements and publicity measures, they are trying to cleanse away the negative notions. They are capturing stories and characters that one can relate herself or himself to, very promptly. Even the ideas of Indian-ness, national integrity and the dreams of aspiring Indians are getting linked with the internet as mobile internet is penetrating very fast to balance the digital divide. Various events of online forgery, hacking and getting access to dicey websites (read pornography) and those matters which came as some sort of a cultural shock, made people less confident to use the internet.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Overcoming the fear…</h2>
<p>Recently, these notions have been countered by commercials by an antivirus company. The commercial shows a mother [3] who is no longer anxious to let her son surf the internet because now the antivirus allows her to enable parental control. It is helping the mother as she no longer has to keep constant vigil on the internet-related activities of her son. Other commercial shows a retired old man [4] is not sceptical anymore that his son sends money using online banking. His son and the man use the antivirus which offers safe online banking.</p>
<p>There are two more advertisements I want to describe; the first one features a young man [5] shopping online and updating the viewers that an antivirus protection means safe online transactions. In the second ad, a fashion designer [6] is not bothered to use pendrives as the antivirus scan will protect her computer. These four commercials attempt to confront the fear that pesters the minds of the potential consumers. No beautiful models, male or female, no beyond the world creativity, but simple and set with regular characters discussing vital issues were chosen to reach out to these potential customers.</p>
<p>The next commercial I would like to refer to is about an antivirus for smart phones. The ad creates a euphoria that portrays a bunch of college goers [7] who have the power to protect themselves from spyware and malware and can download various applications seamlessly. Thus the point of overcoming the ‘fear’ of the unknown and the uncontrollable is very important. Maybe the two ads featuring the ‘born for the internet’ baby I begun with, find relevance here. And the question should be asked here again: that how far can one travel along the path of life by means of a smartphone with an internet connection? The adverts suggest a very intelligent and exciting life for those who can access to internet. Everything is sorted if you can stay online. A lonely individual [8] can be a Twitter celebrity. Someone can showcase her or his talent [9] through social media; like one ad shows a girl becoming an online singing sensation by garnering lots of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’.</p>
<p>As mobile phones remains with us most of the time, accessing the internet from it is easier (compared to a computer) and a mobile phone is thus able to furnish prompt services. There are quite a few service providers that woo us with different approaches. Compared to selling internet connections, it is perhaps far less complicated to produce campaigns for fast moving consumer goods. At least in the case of FMCG it is easier to explain the product which is within range of our four senses. But it is quiet a troublesome project to explain the internet given the social back drop in a country like India. This article will not take names of any of the service providers. Instead it will point out the strategies they are adopting to touch an emotional chord for the probable consumers keeping the existing ones. Furthermore, it would like to find out the nature and meaning of the internet and outlook of its users in the Indian scenario.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Power redefined…</h2>
<p>The internet providers proclaim through the advertisements that an internet connection on one’s mobile is a ‘power’ for her or him. The power that has the ability to bring all the nuances that is available around. Only the burning questions are:</p>
<ul>
<li>How to use the power? Whether to play online games, immerse oneself in social networking, and use a search engine to search for the unknown or perhaps read an academic article from Jstor? There are immense possibilities to the power.</li>
<li>How long can the power be used (read limited or unlimited connection)?</li>
<li>How much time does it take to get the result of the power (read the speed of the connection)? </li>
<li>And lastly and very importantly how much does this power cost?</li></ul>
<p>These uncertainties are answered by adverts with creativity and almost 20% of the Indian population tries to grab this power. But of course a large segment is still to be included (inclusion may be harder due to various socio-economic conditions that are deep-rooted within the Indian scenario) in the benefit-circle of this power called the internet. The following storyline of another television commercial shows the power called the internet which can allow pictures or videos to be exchanged instantaneously. An ad shows that the internet is a great help for a mother as she sends a picture of her wailing son after a hair-cut, to her husband. As soon as the mother reaches home with her sad boy, the father having got the same hair-cut also returns and is ready to soothe the boy.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Confidence building apparatus…</h2>
<p>Thus, through creative commercials, internet service providers are trying to tell that one should keep an internet connection handy to be confident so that Indians cannot be fooled by anybody anywhere. Several adverts are showcasing the following events that will not occur if one has a mobile internet connection. Such events are quite common and thus one can easily associate oneself with them.</p>
<ul>
<li>Not a single person on earth can fool you [10].</li>
<li>A corrupt political leader cannot go way without fulfilling the promises s/he made [11].</li>
<li>Baseless prediction of religious leaders can be countered [12].</li>
<li>And one of the ads went even further ahead to suggest that the population of India can be controlled if married couples spend time doing various activities that the internet has to offer [13]!</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h2>Self-learning tool…</h2>
<p>The ads promote that one of the activities could be self-learning. There is an enormous package of everything available and it is a flexible way to learn. A slow learner [14] in school may not be given special attention in order to overcome learning difficulties but the internet is very patient and it will not complain. Learn how to write poems [15], how to cook, how to make a drone [16], learn French [17]. Furthermore these ads suggest that an internet user is a self-sufficient human being who can find her or his own way using a Google map! Just like two friends learning culinary skills from internet and opening up a restaurant.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>An institution…</h2>
<p>At this point, the creative pursuit of the commercials take a leap and declare the internet (or the internet connection the particular company is providing) as an institution which is very much inclusive in nature. Those who are barred from getting admission in schools, colleges or universities, are welcome to learn through the institution called the internet and can establish themselves in mainstream society or can learn for the sake of learning. In this case, these ads have pointed out girls are not allowed [18] to go to school, a eunuch [19] is refused everywhere. But they are learning from the internet and compete with the more privileged in mainstream society. Other cases show a mother could not complete [20] her study in law, and her daughter is encouraging her to complete it through the internet. Lastly, these ads try to convince that the institution of the internet is cheaper than regular institutions.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Utility…</h2>
<p>Besides the ambitions of the internet stated above, the internet influences human minds in several other aspects. For example, generation gap can be healed if the society takes the bridge of the internet. About two years ago a commercial was produced with the one-liner: ‘Made for the young’ [21]. This ad shows an old man who parties with young boys, has a social network account, plays online games late at night, does video chat. These activities of the elderly character, who has a very optimistic approach towards life, are set in a mundane surrounding. Here it seems, the internet is bridging the generation gap by bringing into its fold and into the mainstream those people who might not have thought of using the internet in real life.</p>
<p>The notion of a huge expense that is incurred in maintaining an internet connection was busted when some service providers brought out ads which said that it was letting people watch a video for only one rupee. Very precisely, this one rupee campaign enacted the frequent quarrels [22] between a taxi-driver and his passenger over loose change and the taxi driver somehow not returning one rupee but instead showing a popular video to the passenger from his phone in lieu of that one rupee. The basic point of all the campaigns is to intensify the market and push the consumers to pay for it anyhow as an internet connection can bring magic to the consumers’ lives as the service providers claim. But who will pay for the internet connection? So they bring out campaign such as a family plan campaign [23] in which the earning member of the family is being encouraged to pay the cost for the internet packs of the other mobile connections in the family which are also provided by the same mobile service operator. These adverts show a family consisting of a super-lazy boy, an ever-angry father, a protective mother and a sweet, little sister needing the internet more than any other services like roaming, calls, or SMS [24].</p>
<p>Service provides are also trying to entice the consumers by providing some utilitarian services which are needed in day to day life. The following are examples of the storylines of a few other advertisements that help its service-takers to transfer money without even going to the banks. The service provider keeps the notion of flexibility of the internet, which can be used according to the need of the people of every segment of the society: a taxi driver [25] from the city sends money to his father in the village; a husband sends money to his pregnant wife [26], a college-going boy [27] requesting his elder brother to send money for mending his scooter. These characters are common and can be found in our everyday surroundings but such characters may be afraid to use such an online service for transferring money. The soothing and caring tone of theses adverts try to assure people to use the service.</p>
<p>As some of the adverts aim to clear the dilemma among prospective consumers, another set of ads celebrate friendship and urge consumers to go back to their roots. In this regard, a storyline of another commercial can be taken into consideration. It tells a story about some school friends [28] who become successful in their own vocations and who remain connected with the help of smartphones and internet connections. One of them locates an old ice-cream vendor in front of the school they used to study in. They came together to meet that vendor from whom they used to buy ice-cream to help him in his business. Here the online activities result in something meaningful.</p>
<p>This article tried to weave one narrative out of many narratives created by several internet service providers. The main intention of the article was to find out how the internet has been defined in the Indian context and how the users are being defined in the commercials. It is found that the internet may seem super-real (if we are not aware of the technical aspects, it is a real wonder!) at first glance but the commercials through the dramatizing efforts are trying to prove its usefulness in many ways. Just like when a young woman [29] finds out someone is retiring from her office, she starts sending photos of the man to their colleagues and instantly it creates a chain of forwarded messages and then everybody gathers to arrange a surprise farewell party. A happy picture indeed!</p>
<p>However something not bright and prosperous also needs to be mentioned. The internet service providers have been offering high speed internet and portray a happy smart life of Indians irrespective of social background and vocation but almost 80% of India remains untouched and are yet to receive the benefits of an internet connection.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Endnotes</h2>
<p>[1] MTS India. 2014. "MTS Internet Baby Full Version." YouTube. February 24. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg37kafMsWk">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg37kafMsWk</a>.</p>
<p>[2] Premium Adverts. 2015. "Baby - MTS TV Commercial Ad." YouTube. February 18. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3krdHUji8A">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3krdHUji8A</a>.</p>
<p>[3] Mukherjee, Pamela. 2014. "Quick Heal - TVC (Hin) Mother’s VO." YouTube. November 4. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so-bjUuErBQ">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so-bjUuErBQ</a>.</p>
<p>[4] Thoughtshop Advertising & Film Productions Pvt. Ltd. 2014. "QUICK HEAL 'OLD MAN.'" YouTube. July 16. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1kOcz_1Ra8">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1kOcz_1Ra8</a>.</p>
<p>[5] Thoughtshop Advertising & Film Productions Pvt. Ltd. 2014. "QUICK HEAL 'COOL DUDE.'" YouTube. July 16. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2ot0J4ps4A">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2ot0J4ps4A</a>.</p>
<p>[6] Subarna Enterprise. 2014. "Stay protected from virus infected pendrives with Quick Heal Total Security." YouTube. April 10. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rLh0ng70Lc">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rLh0ng70Lc</a>.</p>
<p>[7] Quick Heal. 2013. "Quick Heal Mobile Security TVC (Hindi)." YouTube. March 3. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWiomVUHVHk">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWiomVUHVHk</a>.</p>
<p>[8] MTS India. 2012. "MTS MBLAZE ‘Always On’ LATEST TVC - Anupam Mukerji." YouTube. July 24. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWfyHMbKtsg"">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWfyHMbKtsg</a>.</p>
<p>[9] afaqs. 2012. "MTS MBLAZE TVC - Shraddha Sharma." YouTube. July 17. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsaJtPYTUF8">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsaJtPYTUF8</a>.</p>
<p>[10] Idea. 2014. "Idea ‘No Ullu Banaoing’ Anthem TVC." YouTube. August 8. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZhXSnJ8sXY">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZhXSnJ8sXY</a>.</p>
<p>[11] Idea. 2014. "Idea ‘No Ullu Banaoing’ Politician TVC." YouTube. March 13. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OahDrQDU24k">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OahDrQDU24k</a>.</p>
<p>[12] Idea. 2014. "Idea ‘No Ullu Banaoing’ Baba TVC." YouTube. May 11. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf2hYaHtBF4">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf2hYaHtBF4</a>.</p>
<p>[13] Celeburbia Entertainment Media. 2011. "Idea 3G Funny Ad Campaign - India Over Population - Abhishek Bachchan Sir Ji Ad Series." YouTube. July 23. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqtB-IaeEo8">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqtB-IaeEo8</a>.</p>
<p>[14] Idea. 2015. "Idea Internet Network (IIN) Slow Learner 25 sec TVC." YouTube. May 4. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXFk4VL9rWM">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXFk4VL9rWM</a>.</p>
<p>[15] Idea. 2015. "Idea Internet Network (IIN) Military 25 sec TVC." YouTube. May 4. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwAP6PmGzRs">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwAP6PmGzRs</a>.</p>
<p>[16] Neela, Pradeep. 2015. "Idea Internet Network IIN TV Ad - Drone wala." YouTube. January 11. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPTC945gsDo">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPTC945gsDo</a>.</p>
<p>[17] Idea. 2015. "Idea Internet Network IIN Guide 20 sec TVC." YouTube. May 5. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkQma9Tyt8E">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkQma9Tyt8E</a>.</p>
<p>[18] Falguni, Vineet. 2015. "Idea Internet Network IIN Haryanvi 25 sec TVC." YouTube. January 20. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdVRGxw4ROI">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdVRGxw4ROI</a>.</p>
<p>[19] iDiotube. 2015. "Idea Internet Network IIN Eunuch 25 second TVC HD." YouTube. April 26. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIZS_-Qm5Ro">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIZS_-Qm5Ro</a>.</p>
<p>[20] Idea. 2015. "Idea Internet Network IIN Mother Daughter 20 sec TVC." YouTube. May 5. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBHtLU7QGbE">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBHtLU7QGbE</a>.</p>
<p>[21] Indian Tv Commercials. 2013. "Vodafone Commercial(Sep 2013)-Network(Latest Indian TV Ad)." YouTube. September 28. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6ULTFCWBQw">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6ULTFCWBQw</a>.</p>
<p>[22] Airtel India. 2013. "airtel Re 1 Mobile Video - Taxi Ad (TVC)." YouTube. May 22. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hpi2sOOfeIw">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hpi2sOOfeIw</a>.</p>
<p>[23] Airtel India. 2015. "Airtel my plan Coffee TVC." YouTube. February 5. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ElCIhsobXc">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ElCIhsobXc</a>.</p>
<p>[24] Airtel India. 2014. "airtel money TVC - Pay Electricity Bills." YouTube. January 19. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFHurfXS9uI">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFHurfXS9uI</a>.</p>
<p>[25] Vodafone India. 2015. "Vodafone m-pesa™– Babuji – HD." YouTube. March 16. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktgDPTlFxsU">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktgDPTlFxsU</a>.</p>
<p>[26] Vodafone India. 2014. "Vodafone m-pesa™ - Cable TV – HD." YouTube. June 12. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIMYZDzyHeM">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIMYZDzyHeM</a>.</p>
<p>[27] Vodafone India. 2014. "Vodafone m-pesa™ - Scooter – HD." YouTube. June 2. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQAtnQktHLI">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQAtnQktHLI</a>.</p>
<p>[28] Advartisement. 2015. "Uncle’s Ice Cream Airtel Network In India." YouTube. March 27. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFsG1G7Ombo">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFsG1G7Ombo</a>.</p>
<p>[29] Nirvana Films. 2015. "VODAFONE – Farewell." YouTube. March 19. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqZVO815MiM">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqZVO815MiM</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><em>The post is published under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International</a> license, and copyright is retained by the author.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_users-and-the-internet'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_users-and-the-internet</a>
</p>
No publisherPurbasha AuddyResearchers at WorkInternet StudiesRAW Blog2015-07-10T04:20:54ZBlog EntryEffective Activism: The Internet, Social Media, and Hierarchical Activism in New Delhi
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_effective-activism
<b>This post by Sarah McKeever is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Sarah is a PhD candidate at the India Institute, King’s College London, and her work focuses on the impact of social media on contemporary political
movements. In this essay, she explores the increasingly hierarchical system of activism on the Internet, based on Western corporate desire for data, and how it is shaping who is seen and heard on the Internet in India.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Background</h2>
<p>I will preface this post by stating that as an American, my personal experience of the Internet has been shaped by nearly 18 years as an active user. My experience with digital interfaces, websites, and social media has been formed through my experiences during the Internet revolution in the United States. Academic and personal training have shaped what I determine to be trustworthy, useful, and credible when searching for information. This post is based on field research I am conducting in New Delhi from January through June 2015.</p>
<p>With these preconceptions and standards in mind, I began to research organisations that I felt were credible enough to approach for interviews in January 2015. My current research project investigates the impact that social media has had on the issues of corruption and violence against women in New Delhi, following the social movements on these issues in 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 respectively. I started at an organisational level in order to research the impact that social media and the movements themselves had on organisations working on these issues. Areas of interest include any changes in issue engagement and discourse around gender violence and corruption. I focused exclusively on organisations that have an office in New Delhi and engage in activism in an urban context. Many of these organisations also have a presence in other states and include rural as well as urban projects. I conducted semi-structured interviews in order to engage with the changes wrought by the digital on a qualitative rather than quantitative basis.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Activism and Digital Hierarchy: A Divided Internet?</h2>
<p>While conducting initial research, I began to investigate two separate but related areas of inquiry. The first was relatively straightforward: what type of differences were there between groups which actively engaging with the affordances of the Internet and Web 2.0? In my research I examined online awareness groups and campaigns as well as more traditional advocacy and awareness groups that were struggling to translate their work onto the Internet and on social media.</p>
<p>While engaging with the first question, I quickly discovered that the divide between how organisations leveraged the affordances of the Internet - and social media in particular - was stark. Earl and Kimport (2011) write that organisations that directly translate previous advocacy on the ground onto the Internet fail to fully leverage the affordances of the Internet. Organisations that effectively utilise the strengths of the Internet - including flash tactics, crowd-sourcing, and networked leadership - have in fact transformed the world of activism. They have created a new type of “digital activism” through the use of an increasingly digital networked society (Castells 2010, Rainie and Wellman 2012). While this is a simplification of the overall argument – and I personally would argue that in actuality organisations work on a range of digital capabilities and the idea of a spectrum rather than a binary division would be more appropriate at this point – it was clear that both sides were struggling to reach some sort of equilibrium between each other’s capabilities when I conducted interviews with them.</p>
<p>The second inquiry stemmed from my engagement with the first: how was the “active” use of the Internet and social media by an organization translating into an interpretation of their effectiveness? In other words, was an “active” social media presence and a slick website contributing to an impression that they were somehow more impactful than the organisations which lacked these features and is this phenomenon creating a new hierarchy of activism in Delhi?</p>
<p>Many of the organisations that I spoke with who used the Internet and social media “well,” attracted foreign attention and funding. It is clear there is a monetary incentive for organisations to be present and easily accessible via search engines and social media platforms. And while social media has become a huge selling point in India - including in last year’s Parliamentary elections - much of the funding and attention appears to come from outside of India in these particular cases. While social media has become a popular tool for outreach in New Delhi, the emphasis placed on it is possibly being driven by forces outside of India in the activist sphere.</p>
<p>Organisations that had been involved in advocacy and grassroots activism before the Internet boom in India discussed the struggle to make effective use of the affordances of the Internet. My participants unilaterally expressed a desire to engage with the digital audience in India – an audience of approximately 310 million users according to Internet Live Stats (2015) – but were often ill equipped to do so. Stated difficulties included a lack of a dedicated communications and media strategist, lack of experience with social media and web design, and difficulty translating nuanced discussion onto social media sites which are not necessarily designed to facilitate complex and controversial discussions. Some participants directly stated that an online presence, whether it was effective or not, had become essential to obtaining foreign funding and attention, as a digital presence represents a tangible deliverable when applying for foreign grants.</p>
<p>It is clear from any cursory examination of social media sites that the mediums demand an increasing amount of content from its users. Simply put, the more you post, the more you are seen and heard above the increasing noise and chaos of social media. And if being seen and heard represents success, the message itself can get lost in translation. Click bait, sponsored posts, and buzzy headlines attract far more attention and gain more traction than any post attempting to create nuance and demand deeper engagement, at least in the cases I have personally observed and in my experience with activist groups.</p>
<p>The growing popularity of social awareness campaigns and organisations designed for the online world were quite obviously far more successful in utilising social media and web pages to draw attention to a specific issue. These campaigns especially were extremely popular with Delhi youth in particular and effectively used visual displays - such as crowd-sourced images and provocative posters - to highlight issues of gender violence and corruption. Occasionally some participants were outwardly dismissive of older advocacy groups, which they felt were out of step with the times and content to stay in their comfort zones.</p>
<p>In spite of the success of many online campaigns on the issues I researched, few were able to translate the momentum generated by the campaign into a broader discussion and deeper engagement on their chosen issue. While some participants stated this was not necessarily what they desired to do - some chose to remain purely as an awareness campaign without moving into advocacy - other participants stated a desire to do more and engage with the complex cultural, societal, and political constructs surrounding gender and corruption in India. When they attempted to engage in this more nuanced conversation, they often lost momentum on social media and occasionally stopped their campaign efforts altogether.</p>
<p>The rift was clear, and the struggle to merge worlds and effectively translate a variety of skill sets into effective advocacy was fairly well delineated. What troubled me was the implicit assumption that was being made around “effective” and “good” use of the Internet and social media. Why did a glossy website and an “active” social media presence appear to translate into organisational effectiveness? What was driving that assumption? It was an assumption I occasionally found myself making when researching organisations and even in some of my earliest interviews. Why did daily Facebook posts, likes, multiple Tweets, and followers translate into an interpretation of success and impact?</p>
<p>As Western, and in the case of Facebook and Twitter, American publically traded companies, there is a clear business prerogative in encouraging ever-increasing usage of their sites. More posts and tweet equals more data, which can then be analyzed or sold to a variety of different entities that want to utilise this data to create wealth. Facebook and Twitter also happen to be sites that can be used to generate conversation around key issues and act as an easy way to aggregate thousands, if not millions, of users behind a cause. The Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the Delhi Rape case mobilisations are only some of the hundreds of cases where social media sites have played a key role in mobilizing political, social, and cultural change.</p>
<p>However there is a corporate prerogative at work that is often ignored in these narratives. It is in a social media companies’ best interest to encourage frequent usage, as this is how free services generate revenue. Those who post the most win the race to be seen and heard. Those who do not - or do not have the funds to pay for sponsored posts or tweets - get lost in the shuffle, viewed as out of step and struggling to adapt to modern urban India, regardless of the quality work they may be doing offline. The “good” user is the most active user, regardless of what the content actually is. It can easily be termed as a binary between quantity versus quality, but this diminishes the extremely effective and thoughtful work of some digital media campaigns, which demands a different type of quality to actually become an impactful movement. It is therefore a more complex phenomenon than blindly generating massive amounts of content, but this is certainly a critical piece to digital success.</p>
<p>My conclusion, and one which was discussed and inspired by an early participant, was that it was the social media platforms – including key sites like Facebook, Twitter, and to a lesser extent YouTube - were partially generating and multiplying the aura of effectiveness around organisations and groups which had heavily emphasized social media as a core part of their outreach strategy. This is not to deny the very real success that several of these campaigns have had in generating conversation and change around critical issues in India. It instead questions why our notion of success and effectiveness has been altered so quickly, especially in an urban and digital context.</p>
<p>Based on my fieldwork, I encountered a digital hierarchy in three different aspects in activist groups. These divisions emerge at the level of search engines and ranking, web page aesthetics, and finally social media usage and statistical data. I will briefly examine these levels in the following sections.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Level I: Search Engines and Page Rankings</h2>
<p>The first was generated at the level of the search engine. Higher ranked and frequently visited websites appear higher on any search engine page, based on the search algorithm. In the first searches I conducted, several organisations with well-developed and easily navigable websites always appeared high on the search page, and were the first organisations I made contact with. As I began to dig deeper into partner organisations and get recommendations from my participants, I discovered new organisations that had never appeared in any search I had conducted, in spite of their clear links to the issues I was researching. These organisations have less of an audience and less of a digital voice from the very beginning. This is not even engaging with the issue of language on the Internet, as all of my searches were in English and not in Hindi or any other language spoken in India and were focussed initially only on organisations with an office in Delhi.</p>
<p>A second issue at the level of the search engine was that the organisations that appeared highest on the list had links to larger partner organisations in Europe and the United States, and occasionally had head offices in New York or London. The larger global presence may have had an impact on page ranking, as they were more likely to be searched for and recognised globally. The dominance of English on the Internet may also play a role, limiting the potential set of results, though again I made this decision consciously. Language choice has had a demonstrable impact on what a person sees on the Internet and what appears using the same search term. The burden of visibility influencing potential digital impact is clear, and practically forces some organisations to invest in a digital presence without a clear digital strategy. This can prove extremely detrimental – especially if the web page proves difficult to navigate and use, which I discuss in the following section - and move investment away from advocacy and programmes on the ground. Visibility is also a key concern for groups that exist purely as a digital campaign, as their potential success is based almost solely on how easy they are to find. Failure leads to diminished searches and lower rankings outside of the first results page from a search engine, which few people click beyond, thus dramatically limiting the impact an organisational webpage can have from the very beginning.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Level II: Webpage Aesthetics</h2>
<p>The second area consisted of the content and ease of use of the website. As a researcher, I was compelled to look into every recommended organisation that engaged with the issues I was researching. That being said the organisations with more developed websites caught my attention and implicitly created the impression that it was a more desirable contact. This is quite obviously not the case in reality, and often the organisations that had less advanced websites and appeared technologically less capable proved to be highly credible sources doing commendable work. However the difficulty of navigating some of the websites, which included issues such as broken hyperlinks, difficult interfaces, and offered very little information on the activities of the organisations would prove deeply unappealing to an observer with less motivation than myself. Going against my own training and experience and trusting the power of the network of recommendations on the ground proved to be just as useful as fairly random web searches. In terms of first impressions, it is difficult to move beyond these issues of navigation for an outside observer which expects a quality organisation to have a quality website.</p>
<p>Again, organisations with head offices based in the United States or Europe often were easily navigable and had high quality webpage design, representing a clear trend and highlighting the emphasis placed on the digital aboard. It was also very clearly which organisations had started on the Internet, based purely on design and functionality, though there was a certain bias as the Internet campaigners I spoke too had all had had great success as an online campaign. Finding failed campaigns would have added a key counterpoint to my work, but the difficulty of doing so proved insurmountable for this particular project. Design and navigability are key indicators of skill and investment in digital presence from an outsider’s perspective. It is less than representative of the story on the ground and the success of an organisation, especially if it is not a purely digital entity.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Level III: Social Media Use and Statistics</h2>
<p>The third and final level I encountered was determined by social media use. For every organization or participant I met I did cursory research on the various social media platforms they used, how many likes or followers they had near the day of my interview, and roughly how often the organization posted and tweeted. About 90% of my participant organisations had a least a Facebook page and a Twitter account. The number of followers varied widely, from about 200 to nearly 200,000 on Facebook and Twitter. Daily posts and variety of content was a key component to the success of the more widely followed groups online. It was immediately clear that groups that posted sporadically and without immediately stimulating content did not generate or gain nearly as much digital attention.</p>
<p>Many organisations discussed the struggle to move beyond a closed and familiar network, to reach out to the audience they know is there. But without a clear strategy, and even more importantly without a dedicated communications position, their digital engagement often mirrored their offline audience; a closed network of individuals already dedicated to change in the area the organisation was working in. They often failed to meet the incessant demands of the medium for easy content and had difficulties expanding their reach or message beyond their previously established networks of influence.</p>
<p>Those organisations which were able to attract digital attention on social media, while feeling it was an important tool for outreach – especially for youth in Delhi – and places where conversations on key issues could take place, also discussed the importance of social media statistics as a measurable deliverable. Donors, especially foreign funders, placed an emphasis on growth on social media sites as an indicator of success and growing influence. Whether social media growth can actually be an indicator of influence is still up for debate, but it is indicative of the notion that success means quantity, rather than quality, similar to the Western corporate prerogative of growth. That this is the new measure and standard of success for an activist organization is a troubling trend, and one unlikely to change in the near future.</p>
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<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>I have argued that corporate strategies and imperatives are creating this new class system of activism in India. I labelled it a “Western” corporate strategy, based on the American origins of the main players Facebook and Twitter, which are the predominate mediums my participants engaged with and have some of the largest audiences in India. Facebook had 108 million users of May 2014 Twitter has around 19 million users (Statista 2015) in India, though these are estimates and in all likelihood there has been an increase in users. The new hierarchy masks the reality that impact and results cannot be measured by likes and retweets. While there is indeed power in these particular sites, the difficulty in documenting what influence actually translates into in the offline world is a well-documented debate. I do not doubt that the Internet and social media, in urban and increasingly in rural India, have great affordances. But these advances do not have to come at the expense of equally important organisations whose ability to translate these messages digitally is more limited than others, especially when this hierarchy is partially generated by corporate sensibilities whose sole aim is profit generation.</p>
<p>While this hierarchy has been explored as an issue of second-level digital divide- where the issue is not lack of access but lack of training and knowledge of the digital world – I do not believe this is the only issue at stake. The increasing power of large companies to determine the way we interact and the rules of effective communication and transmission are deeply troubling, and leaves little room for alternatives. Collaboration can be an effective way of mitigating some of the differences, but this option is not always available to every group.</p>
<p>While these are questions that require further examination, it is clear that there is a divide between organisation’s digital strategies and whether they are able to leverage the affordances of the Internet and social media applications. I have argued that the operational aspects of social media sites increase this divide in particular, as they demand increasing amounts of data to generate profit. A strong digital presence is increasingly linked to an idea of effectiveness and impact, without investigating offline realities. This in turn can lead to a new hierarchy of activism, which limits the voices of some and magnifies the digital voices of others who are clearly better at manipulating the advantages of the Internet. I do not wish to say that offline activism is more effective than online activism and that we should not engage with digital mediums to promote. I only seek to question how this increasingly digital reality is creating a hierarchal system that is not reflective of offline reality, question what knowledge might be left behind in the process, and critically examine the underlying structures and platforms underlying the growing field of digital activism in India.</p>
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<h2>References</h2>
<p>Castells, M. (2010) Networks of Outrage and Networks of Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, Cambridge, MA: Polity Press</p>
<p>Earl, J. and Kimport, K. (2011) Digitally Enabled Social Change: Activism in the Internet Age Cambridge, MA: MIT Press</p>
<p>Internet Live Stats (2015) www.internetlivestats.com Accessed 23 May 2015</p>
<p>Rainie, L. and Wellman, B. (2012) Networked: The New Social Operating System, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Statista (2015) www.statista.com Accessed 25 May 2015</p>
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No publisherSarah McKeeverSocial MediaDigital ActivismResearchers at WorkRAW Blog2015-07-16T08:22:13ZBlog Entry