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WikiWars - A report
http://editors.cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wwrep
<b>The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore and the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, hosted WikiWars – an international event that brought together scholars, researchers, academics, artists and practitioners from various disciplines, to discuss the emergence and growth of Wikipedia and what it means for the information societies we inhabit. With participants from 15 countries making presentations about Wikipedia and the knowledge ecology within which it exists, the event saw a vigorous set of debates and discussions as questions about education, pedagogy, language, access, geography, resistance, art and subversion were raised by the presenters. The 2 day event marked the beginning of the process that hopes to produce the first critical reader – Critical Point of View (CPOV) - that collects key resources for research and inquiry around Wikipedia.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The
debates around Wikipedia, the de facto dynamic knowledge production system
online, are very fairly divided into two competing camps. There is a group of
people who swear by Wikipedia – celebrating its democratic processes of
knowledge production, ease of access, and the de-canonisation of knowledge to
produce the ‘WikiWay’; And then there is a group of people who swear at
Wikipedia – raising concerns over authenticity, reliability, vulgarisation of
knowledge and the de-hierarchisation of knowledge systems that Wikipedia seems
to embody. The debates between the two groups are often passionate and situated
in wildly speculative and often personal interests and investments in Wikipedia
and the Web 2.0 Information Revolution that it seems to be a symptom of. The
debates also play out in various international locations, most of them relying
on personal anecdotes, experiences and half hearted data that does not stand
the tests of rigour.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">WikiWars,
then, concentrated on things which are about Wikipedia but also not about Wikipedia.
In many ways, as Geert Lovink, the Director of INC suggested, WikiWars was a
recognition of the fact that Wikipedia has come of age and can now be
systematically and philosophically examined as a work in progress that has
long-term implications about our future. It was the ambition of the Editorial
team (consisting of Geert Lovink, Sabine Nerdeer, Nathaniel Tkacz, Johanna
Niyesito, Sunil Abraham and Nishant Shah) to veer away from the recognised
battle-lines drawn in, around and about Wikipedia, and instead examine the
fault-lines that run under many of our assumptions, prejudices and imaginations
of Wikipedia. And Wikiwars, through careful screening and invested interests,
became one of the first platforms in the world to initiate a critical discourse
on Wikipedia, seeking to engage with its histories, it contemporary
manifestations and practices, and the futures that it seeks to inhabit.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The
different presentations brought in located debates, theoretical and
philosophical concepts and personal experiences to build frameworks that
explain and contextualise Wikipedia as one of the most contested spaces online.
The eight panels across two days dealt with four major thematic areas which
need to be summarised in brief:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst">1. <strong><u>Education, Pedagogy and
Knowledge:</u></strong> At the very basis of Wikipedia (and
other structures like it) is the question of knowledge production, the
possibility of using it as an educational tool and the potentials it has for
introducing new pedagogies and learning practices in and outside of institutionalised
education. Presenters from various disciplines engaged with these questions in
interesting ways.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">Usha
Raman from Teacher Plus in Hyderabad, brought in the question of primary
education, the need for teacher training programmes and the ways by which
infrastructure development needs to be thought through when talking of
Wikipedia and education in the Indian context. The
necessity of locating Wikipedia in a much larger debates on learning were also
echoed by Noopur Rawal and Srikeit Tadepalli, students from Christ University
who brought their experience of Wikipedia and the expectations from classroom
education and learning in their presentation. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">In
the same field, but from a different approach, a panel examined Wikipedia as a site to critique
Western Knowledge production systems. Stian Haklev and Johanna Niyesito
concentrated on the questions of language and knowledge production. Haklev made
an impassioned argument deconstructing the utopian idea of Wikipedia’s
multilingual dreams and instead made a call for recognising the black-holes
when it comes to non-English production and consumption of knowledge on
Wikipedia. He further explored the implications that linguistic imbalance has
on the very governance structure of Wikipedia and its communities. Niyesito
challenged the ‘global’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ image that Wikipedia has built for
itself and posited the idea of Wikipedia as a translingual space where
different languages and cultures negotiate common understandings and processes
of producing knowledge. HanTeng
Liao explored knowledge production through the market economy of key-words to
see how the linguistic biases of search engines that harvest these keywords,
determines the access and visibility of different Wikipedia pages.</p>
<strong><u>Resistance, Diversity
and Representation:</u></strong> While these questions were present as
undercurrents to most of the presentations at WikWars, they were perhaps most
fiercely present in the debates that followed the presentations by Eric Ilya
Lee (Academia Sinica, Taiwan), YiPing Tsou (National Central University,
Taiwan), William Beutler and Eric Zimmerman (IDC, Israel).
<p> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">For
Lee and Tsou, the responses to the Chinese language Wikipedia from popular
media and personal experiences, were demonstrative of the fact that the lack of
diverse means of representation and participation lead to a strong resistance
of Wikipedia in Taiwan. Beutler
looked at the heavily contested editorial space and policies of Wikipedia to
make a point about how lack of effective governance systems based on
mutual tolerance and diversity lead to
stressful and often traumatic experiences for users who might not be
represented through the mainstream ideas and
ideologies of an English speaking populace.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">Zimmerman
took a startling position, calling for a regime of attribution and dissolving
the pseudonymous structures of knowledge production in Wikipedia in order to
build designs of trust and verification into the system, thus leading to better
and more credible research tools and representations.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">The
tone of debates was altered with presentations by Mark Graham (Oxford Research
Institute) and the team of artists Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kildal, the team
responsible for the Wikipedia Art Project. Graham
showed the complexity of visualising space and how the production of space (or
physical geography) on Wikipedia often reflects the virtual density of access
and presence online. Showing a nuanced set of images that help mapping these
new geographies for a richer diversity and representation, Graham showed how
systems like Wikipedia ‘cannot know what they cannot know’ despite the reliance
on the wisdom of crowds.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">Stern
and Kildall, in giving an account of their project which used Wikipedia’s
policies to undermine and challenge it, show how the institutionalisation of a
space and its ‘canonisation’ can quickly lead to a new set of problems where
the space becomes the very thing it had set itself against.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">3. <strong><u>Politics of Free, Open
and Exclusion:</u></strong> The rhetoric of free and open have been
built into all popular discourses around Wikipedia. However, the presentations
at WikiWars showed that these need to be taken with at least a pinch of salt
and further examined for what they signify. Alok
Nandi of Architempo made a dramatic and creative revisit of these guiding
principles of Wikipedia. He showed how an inquiry into rituals of
participation, distortion and access on Wikipedia can promote, not merely
looking at the politics of exclusion but also at the politics of inclusion and
the problems therein.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">Dror
Kamir’s evocative narrative of ‘Your side, my side and Wikipedia’ illustrated
how the question of boundaries, of knowledges, of facts and truths get
distorted as language, community, nationality, etc. come into play in recording
and documenting knowledge on Wikipedia. Concentrating on conflict zones in the
Middle East, he talked about the lack and perhaps the impossibility of
producing neutrality the way in which Wikipedia demands of its users. These
ideas resonated with the propositions that ShunLing Chen from Harvard had
floated in the opening panel to explore the ‘boundary work’ of Wikipedia and
how it defines and produces itself in relation to external forces and
controversies. These
discussions on the politics of presence, absence, inclusion and exclusion were
further layered by presentations by Linda Gross, Elad Weider, Heather Ford and
Nathaniel Tkacz who produced a critique of the Free and Open, taking a
cautionary step away from accepting these as inherently good.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">While
Gross explored the structure of egalitarianism that Wikipedia builds for
itself, Ford presented an analysis of the licensing regimes of the knowledge
produced within Wikipedia and the problems they pose to traditional knowledges
and non-mainstream information. Weider,
trained as a lawyer, critiqued the neo-liberal discourse around Wikipedia and
tried to correlate the communities with markets. Tkacz’s historical overview of
Free and Open, resulted in a compelling inquiry into the very structures that
inform the shape and functioning of objects like Wikipedia.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Twitter:
#WikiWars <a href="http://twitter.com/wikiwars">http://twitter.com/wikiwars</a>
and <a href="http://www.twitter.com/jackerhack/wikiwars">www.<strong>twitter</strong>.com/jackerhack/<strong>wikiwars</strong></a><cite></cite></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Flickr:
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/30479432@N03/sets/72157623193288710/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/30479432@N03/sets/72157623193288710/</a></p>
<p>
CPOV blog : <a href="http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/">http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/</a></p>
<p> </p>
<p>The videos fom the Wikiwars event are embedded below:</p>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHM_HIA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHM_QoA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHM_RgA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHM_z4A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHN2T4A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHN2gMA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHN2iUA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHN2z0A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHN3C4A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHN3QYA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHN3QYA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOgCwA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOgGgA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOgiUA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOqA4A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOqxYA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOrhIA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOrm4A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOrycA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOzEoA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHQoxAA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHQo3MA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHSrGAA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHSsTcA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHToz8A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHUuGIA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHUuTIA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHUugsA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHUvW8A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHUvk8A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHVuwwA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHdpxMA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHdz3IA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHd0DMA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHd0iYA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHf4nkA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHf404A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHf43AA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHf5EIA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHf5zYA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHghjkA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgh0EA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgiAIA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgiFcA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgiUMA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgijUA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgjjIA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgjyAA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgjzwA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgj1QA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgkCQA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgkE8A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgkHEA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgkTcA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHg3n8A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHg3zgA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHg4GIA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHg5ykA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHg52gA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHhjUEA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHhr04A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHhsAcA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHh10oA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHh114A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHh%2B0AA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHh%2B2EA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHh_AcA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHh_A8A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHh_lQA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHh_w4A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHjmiIA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHjnHEA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHjuxkA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHjuzwA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHjvRUA"></embed>
<embed height="270" width="320" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHj4kEA"></embed>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wwrep'>http://editors.cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wwrep</a>
</p>
No publishernishantDigital GovernanceWikipediaFeaturedCyberculturesWorkshopCPOV2010-10-06T11:21:56ZBlog EntryWhose Change Is It Anyway? | DML2013
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/nishant-shah-whose-change-is-it-anyway
<b>As a preparation for the DML conference, Nishant Shah had an interview with Howard Rheingold, a cyberculture pioneer, social media innovator, and author of "Smart Mobs. Nishant Shah is chair of 'Whose Change Is It Anyway? Futures, Youth, Technology And Citizen Action In The Global South (And The Rest Of The World)' track at DML2013. Here, he talks about shifts in citizen engagement in Indian politics and civics, and the underlying significance of these changes.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify;">"More and more, you have young people who are trying to come together, not merely to express discontent, but actually take action so that they can build the kinds of futures they want to occupy."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The 2013 DML conference will be held in March 14-16, 2013 in Chicago, Illinois. The conference is supported by the MacArthur Foundation and organized by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub located at the University of California's systemwide Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">More details about the DML2013 Conference and the Call For Workshop/Panel/Paper Proposals can be found at the conference website: <a class="external-link" href="http://dml2013.dmlhub.net">dml2013.dmlhub.net</a>.</p>
<hr />
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Video</h3>
<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Q1ueRSm1TTw" frameborder="0" height="315" width="320"></iframe></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/nishant-shah-whose-change-is-it-anyway'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/nishant-shah-whose-change-is-it-anyway</a>
</p>
No publishernishantVideoCyberculturesResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-04-24T11:47:19ZBlog EntryWatson knows the Question
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/watson-knows
<b>Now that an algorithm has given humans a run for their money on a quiz show, it’s time to rethink the idea of a machine. A fortnightly column on ‘Digital Natives’ authored by Nishant Shah is featured in the Sunday Eye, the national edition of Indian Express, Delhi, from 19 September 2010 onwards. This article was published on March 6, 2011.</b>
<p>Quantum theory suggests that multiple universes exist where every possible alternative can come true. If this were the case, somewhere there must be a world filled with machines that are looking at human evolution and figuring out new and advanced human machine relationships. Or for those who are not very quantum minded, imagine a world where machines are the evolved species and they depend upon human technology — emotional connections, semantic learning, etc. — for their daily transactions and survival. I am not suggesting a futuristic dystopia, like the kind that science fiction specialises in. However, it would be interesting to imagine a world where technology is not only at the periphery of human civilisation but at the centre of it.</p>
<p>I am proposing this world view to revisit the idea of a digital native. We have, so far, in scholarship and practice, education and policy, only looked at digital natives as young human beings who interact in new and innovative ways with evolving technologies, to form human-machine networks and assemblages. However, as Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence Augmentation develop to produce thinking technologies, it is time to start looking at being sapient as not necessarily a human condition.</p>
<p>Early last month, an artificially created super computing system called Watson (elementary, surely?) took the world by a storm as it competed against two human contestants on a popular American quiz show called Jeopardy! The trivia-based show provides answers clustered around a particular theme, and contestants have to ask the correct question to the answer, to win prize money. It is not a straightforward question-answer show because it relies on more than human memory and recollection. It gives cryptic clues (like the ones we are used to in a crossword), offers semantic relationships which need more than just a database memory, and relies on the contestants’ abilities to make creative connections between the clues in order to guess the right questions.</p>
<p>Watson, a product of seven years of research by IBM Research, works on an algorithm which simulates human language and cognitive patterns to make intelligent connections and deductions to understand the context of the clues and then provide answers. Powered by 2,800 super powered computers on a high-speed network, Watson competed against Jeopardy!’s biggest champions and made history as it showed extraordinary human learning and predictive powers. It has been one of the biggest achievements in advanced computing to develop an algorithm that mimics human learning and has changed the way in which we look at the human-machine relationship.</p>
<p>While much commentary on Watson revolves around what it means to be human, and subsequently, what it is to be a digital native, I have a different proposition to make. Perhaps, Watson’s debut on American television is not only about thinking what is human, but also about what it means to be a machine.</p>
<p>First, the Watson that appeared on TV was a sleek display screen that stood behind a lectern in the studio along with the human contestants. The original Watson was next door, being cooled by refrigeration units, but it appeared to the human audience (in and outside the studio) in its avatar. This was a radically new idea because we have always thought of the avatar as a technology based representation of human users. We find avatars on Facebook and in online role-playing games. To think of a machine appearing in a human form was radically new.</p>
<p>Second, Watson was not able to just make predictions by mining information. It was also able to display levels of confidence. If Watson was not confident about an answer, it did not push the buzzer to answer. In fact, once the information was harvested, it displayed its top three guesses to show that, like human contestants, it calculated risks of wrong answers.</p>
<p>Third, Watson was able to display or at least simulate human emotions. It took guesses even when in doubt. It showed a spirit of adventure and played big. It was disappointed when it lost or was happy when it got the answers. It was able to display its “emotions” through various displays in its form and could get the audience’s attention, applause and support.</p>
<p>What this experiment suggests to me is that Watson is perhaps a digital native. All our concentration has always been on human subjects, but synthetic life forms and technology-based intelligence, are blurring this distinction between humans and technologies. We should start thinking of a digital native as neither machine nor human being, but a combination of the two, residing simultaneously in both the realms of the physical and the digital. Watson is perhaps a new digital native, a technology that is growing and slowly learning from its interactions with the human world around it. One of these days, we might be living in the midst of computational devices, which, when we are flummoxed, might turn to us and say, “Elementary, my dear Sherlock!”</p>
<p>Contact: digitalnative@expressindia.com</p>
<p>Read the original in the Indian Express <a class="external-link" href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/watson-knows-the-question/757315/1">here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/watson-knows'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/watson-knows</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaCyberculturesResearchers at Work2015-05-14T12:24:38ZBlog EntryThe power of the next click...
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/chatroulette
<b>P2P cameras and microphones hooked up to form a network of people who don't know each other, and probably don't care; a series of people in different states of undress, peering at the each other, hands poised on the 'Next' button to search for something more. Chatroulette, the next big fad on the internet, is here in a grand way, making vouyers out of us all. This post examines the aesthetics, politics and potentials of this wonderful platform beyond the surface hype of penises and pornography that surrounds this platform.</b>
<p></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In his
futuristic novel <em>1984</em>,
George Orwell conceived of a Big Brother who watches us all the time, tracking
every move we make, every step we take, and reminding us that we are being
watched. The Internet has often been seen as the embodiment of this fiction.
There are many who unplug computers, look over surreptitious shoulders and wear
tin-foil hats so that their movements cannot be traced. While this caricatured
picture might seem absurd to funny, there is no denying the fact that we are
being stalked by technologies. As our world gets more connected and our
dependence on digital and internet objects grow, we are giving out more and
more of our private and personal information for an easy trade-off with
convenience and practicality.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">As a reply to
the question “Who watches the watchman?” several Internet theorists had
suggested as a reply, a model where everybody looking at everybody else so that
there is no one person who has exclusive powers of seeing without being seen.
In this utopian state, people would be looking at each other (thus keeping a
check on actions), looking after each other (forming virtual care networks) and
looking for each other (building social networks with familiar strangers).
After about 20 years of the first emergence of this discussion vis-à-vis the
World Wide Web , comes an internet platform that produces a strange universe of
people looking at.for.after each other in a condition of extreme vouyerism,
performance, exhibitionism, surveillance and playfulness. It is a website that
the Digital Natives are flocking to because it changes the way they look at
each other. Literally.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Chatroulette! is
a new MMORPG (Massively Multiple Online
Role Playing Game) that uses a Peer-2-Peer network to constantly pair random
people using their web cams, to look at each other. You start a Game and you
begin a series of ‘lookings’ as people look back at you. Connect, cruise,
watch, interact, boot – that is the anatomy of a Chatroullete! game. If you
like what you see, you can linger a while or begin a conversation, or just
‘boot’ your ‘partner’ and get connected to somebody else in the almost infinite
network. In the process you come across the unexpected, unpredictable and the
uncanny. In the last one month of betting my time on Chatroullete!, I have seen
it all and then some more – masturbating teenagers, strip teasing men and
women, animals (including a very handsome tortoise) staring back at me, groups
of friends eating dehydrated noodles and giggling, partners in sexual
intercourse, graphic images of human gentilia, clever advertisements, pictures,
art, musicians performing, dancers dancing, conference delegates staring
bemusedly at a screen, ... the list is endless and probably exhausting. A growing community of
users now dwell on Chatroulette! to connect in this new way that is part speed
dating, part networking, part performance, part voyeurism.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The verdict on
the blogosphere is still not in whether this is a new fad or something more
long-lasting. Irrespective of its
longevity, what Chatroullete! has done is show us a new universe of social
interaction that Digital Natives around the world find appealing. The possibilities of cultural exchange,
collaborative working, love, longing and learning that emerge around
Chatroullete! are astounding. For Digital Natives the appeal of
Chatroullete! is in forging viral and temporary networks which defy the
Facebook way of creating sustained communities of interaction. This is the
defining moment of virtual interaction and online networking –A model that is
no longer trying to simulate ‘Real Life’ conditions online by forming permanent
networks of ‘people like us’. Chatroulette!
marks the beginning of a new way of spreading the message to completely random
strangers, enticing them into thought, exchange and mobilisation through the
world of gaming. The potentials for drawing in thousands of unexpected people
into your own political cause are astounding. It might be all cute cats and
sexual performance now, but it is only a matter of time when Digital Natives
start exploring the possibility of using Chatroulette! to mobilise resources
for dealing with crises in their personal and public environments. The wheel
has been spun. We now wait to see where the ball lands.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/chatroulette'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/chatroulette</a>
</p>
No publishernishantCyberspaceDigital ActivismGamingDigital NativesCybercultures2012-03-13T10:43:41ZBlog EntryThe Making of an Asian City
http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/finalpaper
<b>Nishant Shah attended the conference on 'Pluralism in Asia: Asserting Transnational Identities, Politics, and Perspectives' organised by the Asia Scholarship Foundation, in Bangkok, where he presented the final paper based on his work in Shanghai. The paper, titled 'The Making of an Asian City', consolidates the different case studies and stories collected in this blog, in order to make a larger analyses about questions of cultural production, political interventions and the invisible processes that are a part of the IT Cities. </b>
<p></p>
<p align="center" style="text-align: center;"> <strong>The
Promise of Invisibility: The Making of an Asian IT City</strong></p>
<p><strong>Abstract:</strong>
This paper understands that in emerging Asian contexts, the proliferation and adoption
of Internet technologies leads to two distinct changes in the material
(re)construction of the city:</p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst">1. <em>Built Form of the City:</em>
The physical and material aspects of the city are restructured, redesigned and
realigned to house the infrastructure of Internet Technology economies. </p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast">2. <em>Governance and Administration</em>:
The technologies of governance (and also, the governance of technologies) that reconfigure
the city for better control, regulation and containment of the subjects of the
state.</p>
<p>These
changes are articulated and understood, in contemporary scholarship and discourse,
through the tropes of Access and Transparency, which propose Technology as
neutral. These studies also locate technology as outside of the changing
socio-political transformations that the city undergoes in its attempt to
emerge as an IT City. The framework, by contextualising technology differently
– in larger narratives of continuity and disruption – opens up a dialogue
between cybercultures and social sciences to look at conditions of change It
also shows how the It demonstrates how such an approach to technology studies
enables new and nuanced forms of social sciences inquiry into processes like
Dislocation and Migration, which have never addressed the technology question
as central to the phenomena.</p>
<p><strong>Context</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The 21<sup>st</sup> Century has seen accelerated
urbanisation and spatial restructuration of cities in emerging information
societies around the world. These cities are created as global hubs that shall
not only house the Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
infrastructure, but also embody the aesthetics, politics, practices and
lifestyles that the global cultural revolutions are bringing in. The
technologies are significantly involved in the production of the dominant, the
hegemonic and the coercive, all under the rubric of economic growth and development,
and have affected domains of life, labour and language (Foucault,1998) in
different contexts. It is easy to trace the ways in which lifestyle, cultural
expression (Bagga, 2005), texture of social interaction and mobilisation, and
political and administrative reorganisation (Roy, 2005) have changed in
emerging contexts like India and China.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The efforts at creating
‘global countries’ (Kalam, 2004) that can harness the powers of ICT, have lead
to three distinct forms of changes. These changes can be seen in the built form
of the city, in structures of governance and administration, and in attitudes
and Imagination of technologies as they emerge in popular discourse and
cultural production. Each of these changes is articulated and explained through
the tropes of Transparency and Access. The paper has a specific interest in
looking at sites of dislocation and migration, to illustrate the arguments it
seeks to make. The paper relies on secondary and tertiary literature (often in
translation), unstructured interviews and participant observation to make an
argument about how the aesthetics, mechanics and political <a name="_ednref1" href="#_edn1"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[i]</span></span></a>
imaginaries of technology are a part of the physically changing and
transforming IT cities in Asia. In order to make the argument, however, a brief
context that explains the material signification of these three kinds of
changes, is necessary to be explicated.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em>Beyond the Blogosphere</em></strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">There has been an equal amount of optimism and
scepticism when it comes to talking about the new public spheres that emerge
with the Internet. Clubbed under the short-hand ‘Blogosphere’, both the
evangelists and the critics of the blogosphere, have explored the Habermassian
notion of the engaging public that is crafted with the emergence of new
technologies of literacy, expression and participation. In many ways, the
governance structures that have been discussed earlier, also endorse the
positions taken by these interlocutors. However, much of the discourse,
understands the blogosphere as contained in the digital domains. While a
cause-and-effect model is often posited, the chief interest and focus remains
on the new public, new voices and new spaces within the virtualities of the
World Wide Web. This paper challenges such narrow definitions of the public
sphere, and in fact, goes back to Habermass to locate technologies and public
spaces within a certain historical context. In fact, this paper proposes that
the increasing need for the faith in the blogosphere and the clamour that
surrounds it is symptomatic of how the physical and built public spaces, in
most Asian IT cities, is slowly diminishing.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">In Shanghai, it is the loss of a political public
space of socialist capital and industry that marks the beginning of this
disappearance. 20 years ago, the announcer on every passenger train entering
Shanghai would introduce the city as “the largest industrial city in China.”
When W. E. B. Du Bois, an African-American writer, visited Shanghai in 1959, he
was particularly invited to visit the balcony of Shanghai Mansion, which sits
at the mouth of the Suzhou River and was the tallest building of its time, to
catch a bird’s eye view of the new urban socialist landscape and the
innumerable factory chimneys that speared the sky (Zhang, 2002).<a name="_ednref2" href="#_edn2"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[ii]</span></span></a> Indeed,
an abundant number of factories, warehouses and dockyards cropped up in the
three decades after 1950, and, together with the existing industrial
constructions, made Shanghai a “new metropolis.” Some of them were clustered in
suburban areas, more were scattered in the city area. Some were even squeezed
into <em>Longtangs</em> (the narrow alleyways
of old Shanghai). The industrial constructions include not only factory
buildings but also workers’ residential buildings in factory-concentrated
areas. The workers’ residential buildings were targeted primarily at the senior
or skilled workers among the industrial population. Life in the residential
buildings became an extension of factory life since neighbours were most
probably co-workers in the same factory. It is precisely the great number of
old and new industrial constructions and the rhythmic life going on in them
that composed the socialist industrial space of Shanghai. Needless to say, it
was the fastest growing space in the forty years after 1949.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">However, nine out of ten such spaces have been wiped
out during the fifteen-year urban renewal project, which is perhaps embodied in
the restructuring of the Bund as a space of tourist attraction, and eventually
the building of the Pudong skyline that has now become the iconic face of the
city (Yatsko, 1996, pp 59).<a name="_ednref3" href="#_edn3"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[iii]</span></span></a>
Factories—let alone warehouses—within the Inner Ring Road have either closed
down or been removed. With the closing of the factories, the workers also have
no place to work anymore. Dr. Wang XiaoMing, in his essay on the changing
public space mentions how, once the factory he worked in “had its signboard
removed in 1997, the workers have no place to work anymore. The inhabitants of
Caoyang New Village have thrown away the signboard off the gate a long time ago
and could barely remember that the place was once called the “Workers New
Village.” Large factories located on the outskirts of the city are mostly shut
down and the places are as quiet as cemeteries” (forthcoming, 2010).</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">As Americanised industrial parks sprout up in places
such as the Pudong District of Shanghai, and Kunshan and Suzhou to the north of
Shanghai, the socialist industrial space is shrinking rapidly both within and
without Shanghai. Another space that has significantly diminished is the public
political space. One of the most important requirements socialism places on
urban space is to be able to facilitate large-scale political rallies and
parades (Kewen 2006 and Liang 1959).<a name="_ednref4" href="#_edn4"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[iv]</span></span></a></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Therefore, apart from industrial constructions, the
most eye-catching constructions in Shanghai’s new urban constructions from the
1950s to the 1960s were squares and large meeting halls, which include the People’s
Square, the Sino-Russian Friendship Building, the Cultural Plaza, and so on.<a name="_ednref5" href="#_edn5"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[v]</span></span></a>
Moreover, government agencies of all levels and factories endeavoured to build
conference halls of various sizes for political meetings by transforming
theatre halls or building new ones. In the past, tens of thousands of people
have paraded down the People’s Square to pay tribute to the officials perched
high above on reviewing stands. People rallying in various meeting halls,
changing slogans to express joy, and echoing the instructions from the speakers
on stage, were frequent occurrences. During the Cultural Revolution, the Rebels
staged the final resistance here; in the late 1980s, fervent university
students had swarmed into People’s Square to turn it into a place of revelry (Feuchtwang,
2004).</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">In the blink of an eye, these histories have faded
from the public memory and been completely erased from the city’s architectural
space. Sino-Russia Friendship Building is renamed Shanghai Exhibition Center,
which hosts a constant blur of Expos. After repeated segmentation, People’s
Square is now only a nominal square with a long and narrow driveway and most of
its space has been occupied by new buildings such as the majestic Shanghai
Grand Theatre, the Shanghai Museum, the sunken commercial street and a parking
lot. Cultural Plaza was first transformed into a large flower market which was
later torn down and pushed to a corner to make way for the new “Music Plaza.”
With mass meetings completely eradicated from the life of Shanghai’s residents,
the numerous assembly halls and meeting places of various sizes have naturally
been restructures for other purposes. People participate with zeal in large
assemblies such as concerts, performance competitions, and so on, which have nothing
to do with public politics. It is even possible to say that the audience’s
shrieks in the stadium symbolize the massive decrease of the public political
space in both architectural and spiritual sense (Tang, 2009, pp 327).</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Another cluster of spaces that have significantly
disappeared are the gossip centres concentrated in areas such as the mouth of
NongTang, Lao Hu Zhao <a name="_ednref6" href="#_edn6"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[vi]</span></span></a>,
variety store and lane. It is a cultural given that the Shanghainese like to
strike up a conversation with strangers and to engage in gossip; this is indeed
one of the city’s hallmarks. The Shanghainese can always spare time for gossip:
no matter how busy the atmosphere is, there are always some people who loiter
around with hands in pockets; even the working class who work from dawn to dusk
like to exchange a few words with their neighbours after work. It so happened
that the living space was very cramped for the Shanghainese after the 1950s.<a name="_ednref7" href="#_edn7"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[vii]</span></span></a> The
rich can idle away their time in places such as cinemas whereas the low-income
people can only manage to find a free space of leisure near their residences.
The first choice is the mouth of NongTang adjacent to the footpath, from which
all the comings and goings of residents and the traffics on the streets could
be perceived. There will always be a Lao Hu Zhao near the mouth of a big
NongTang, where you can sit for a whole afternoon and exchange hearsays with
neighbours coming for hot water over a cup of tea; or there is a family-run
variety store whose female boss is quite fond of trading rumours and gossip
with customers across the narrow counter. In times of local or national crises,
this is always the first place where the news is spread and gets distorted.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Things have now changed. Lao Huo Zhaos are gone.
Variety stores are quickly replaced by different kinds of convenience stores
(Huang, 2004, pp 49-50). Although many similar or even smaller family-run
variety stores are opened at the newly-formed district bordering the city, a
stable communication space cannot form in these stores since the male or female
boss is mostly “non-native population”<a name="_ednref8" href="#_edn8"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[viii]</span></span></a>, who
not only is unable to blend in with the local residents but also may move away
at any time. Although being one of the hallmarks of old Shanghai houses, the
nongtangs have been pulled down in large numbers. Those narrow, winding streets
have been either diverted, or straightened and widened. Shabby houses on both
sides of the streets have disappeared. Also gone are the hustle and bustle, the
interfusion of public and private space, and street gossips, which have been
replaced by heavy traffic with exhaust gas and noise. With the increasingly
neat arrangement of construction space within the city, the influx of transient
population, residents increasingly accustomed to shutting doors to the world and
to their neighbours, the overwhelming clamour in the media, and the young
people’s addiction to internet and game bars, the space where rumours and
gossips are spread via mouths and pointing fingers is naturally contracted
(Yeung, 1996, pp. 78-84).</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">These old spaces of early Shanghainese modernity are
quickly replaced by three new built forms. The first are the various
above-ground, underground, and overhead expressways. Intersecting and
intertwining together, they make the whole city look as if it were trapped in a
python’s nest. The second thing that comes to the mind is commercial space.<a name="_ednref9" href="#_edn9"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[ix]</span></span></a>
Shopping malls<a name="_ednref10" href="#_edn10"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[x]</span></span></a>
line both the sides of the streets in downtown Shanghai, whereas hypermarkets
cluster at the periphery of the city (Diao, 2006)<a name="_ednref11" href="#_edn11"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xi]</span></span></a>. With
the speedy expansion of space (Li, 2006)<a name="_ednref12" href="#_edn12"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xii]</span></span></a>, the
style of constructions are increasingly uniform: nearly all of them name
themselves “squares”; shopping malls are
lined with chain stores on every level; chain supermarkets create mazes of
different sizes with dense goods shelves; in office buildings, glass doors and
plastic boards partition the office into many honeycomb-like cubicles, making
the people working in them increasingly look like worker bees; the hospitality
industry is overwhelmed with chain hotels of similar facilities and styles,
even customers often forget which hotel they stay in last time (Fulong, 1999).
The accelerated standardization process in Shanghai’s space highlights a
tendency to obtain the standard outlook of the imagined “international
metropolis” and an urgency to erase the distinct features inherited from the
past.</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">Thirdly, the office space of governments and state
monopolies expands in a unique sense: although the floor area has increased
significantly<a name="_ednref13" href="#_edn13"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xiii]</span></span></a>,
it is the upgrading and the move towards luxury that marks the change. Since
the early 1990s, luxurious office buildings with halls paved with marble floor,
central air conditioning system, shiny wood floors, CEO office suite with
separate bathroom, were built first by banks, then revenue departments,
telecommunication agencies, newspapers offices, television stations, courts,
and police stations of different levels, and at last governments of municipal,
district and even lower levels.<a name="_ednref14" href="#_edn14"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xiv]</span></span></a> Not
only the connotation of “work” has been enriched, but also other business
spaces outside the office have expanded with restaurants, coffee bars, official
reception hotels, training centers and vacation centers located in the office
buildings or on the outskirts of town or other cities (Leaf, 1997, pp. 156-159).
</p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">The changes in the built form of the new IT City that
has emerged, are particularly important because they signal the ways in which
certain kinds of populations are made redundant in the city as it grows
physically more hostile to their life in it. The erasure of histories, of
public spaces, of spaces of political negotiation is symptomatic of the new
ideologies, policies and dreams that Shanghai-Pudong embody. Most of the
studies that look at these changes, concentrate only on the physical and
material aspects of it, and ignore the aesthetics, politics, and changes that
Internet technologies are bringing in, not only in the imagination of what
constitutes a city, but also in the material and lived practices of the people
in it (Appadurai, 1990). Government policies that ignore technologies, come to
dead-ends in their intervention, as they fail to recognise the new geographies
and terrains that the technology users navigate through. Interventions by the
Development Sector or the Civil Society Movements often fail to recognise the
structures of governance as informed by internet technologies, thus
perpetrating the very evils that they fight against. Dislocation and Migration,
which are complex issues, get reduced to only geography and physical places –
leading to a simplified structure of rehabilitation, largely propelled by the
vocabulary of the market and the state. Remunerations, economic rights and
livelihood are the only questions addressed. In the process Community rights,
structures of communication and networking, relationships within families and
societies, ineffable ties and bonds that keep the communities coherent – these
affective categories which are dislocated and forced to migrate because of the
presence of technologies, fail to register either in the scholarship or in the
practices in these areas. <strong><u></u></strong></p>
<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">This is where the blogosphere needs to be located – as
not merely producing a new space of engagement, but helping in recovering the
lost spaces of public participation and community communication. The blogosphere
is not merely the invention of a technology marked digital native or the
discovery of groups seeking alternative narratives. It is recognition of the
fact that the regular mainstream public discourse, interacts with the social
transformations and politics of our time and depend on the sustenance of public
spheres for the socio-cultural categories like communities, neighbourhoods,
public space, etc. to survive. The blogosphere, in the quickly changing,
hyper-real landscape of Shanghai-Pudong’s geography is the new variety store,
the new location for the Lao Hu Zhao and the space that the labyrinthine
networks of nongtangs are mapped on.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em>e-Governance and its discontents</em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The change in the
physical reorganisation of the city is not only a pragmatic decision. This disappearance of the public
space of gossip, information dissemination and distortion, of informal
conversations and deliberations tied in closely to the three levels of
government in Shanghai – district government, street office and alley office –
being able to increasingly control the leisure life of the Shanghainese through
administrative planning and organisation (Zhang, 2004). There is a clear link
between the government’s imagination of its own territory, the notion of the
citizen who is to occupy these spaces, and the material practices that happen
in these technology marked spaces (Feuchtwang, 2004). While it is an
acknowledged fact that the Chinese government does not follow the structures
and paradigms that a North-Western Democratic Liberal ideology that has
produced the category of Nation-State in most contemporary discourse, there are
still two specific forms of technology inflected governance structures which
China seems to share with other contexts which might be geo-politically different.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The e-Governance models,
which find resonances in most emerging contexts in the Global South, seem to
develop two simultaneous and often ironically related approaches towards
citizenship and administration, especially in the context of China. With its
already forked governance policies, which treat HongKong – its colonial success
story – differently from the rest of Mainland China (and the added complication
of Taiwan) the governance structures are marked by technology in significant
ways. These structures are suffused with irony, because of the tropes of
transparency and invisibility that they use to articulate their rationale and
processes.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The first is the
approach of Rural Development through ICT networks, positing an access based
model of participatory citizenship (Tarlo, 2003) and continuing the Development
rhetoric of uplift and reform of the deprived citizen. This particular kind of
governance structure re-imagines the beneficiary of state/government processes
as existing in a condition of invisibility, and outside of the folds of
technology. The particular emphasis on e-government, while it is located in the
urban settings, is actually intended for reaching the citizen in the remote
parts of the country, who does not have any engagement or direct interaction
with processes of governance. Despite China’s three tiered government
structure, the imagination of e-governance hold a strong currency because it
makes visible, the people, practices and communities which otherwise exist in
the subliminal and grey areas which were hitherto not in the focus of the
government. Fuelling the rhetoric of e-government is the premium on information
dissemination and transparent administration in order to enhance the domains of
life and labour in the rural parts of the country.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This approach draws its
strength from the Development agenda of reform and uplift as it markedly
emphasises the distance between the ‘haves and the have-nots’. However, the
valourisation of transparency goes hand-in-glove with the production of the
invisible (but cognisable) citizen who needs to be reproduced within the
paradigms of technology. The peasant, who has been at the back-bone of China’s
socialist political ideology, under this new articulation of transparency,
becomes invisible – robbed of the historicity, the cultural iconoclasms and the
empowerment that such policies earlier provided. Instead, the peasant becomes a
worker who needs to be rehabilitated into the changing geographies of Pudong,
the new IT city that requires a worker equipped with new skills and lifestyles.
This approach draws its strength from the Developmental agenda of reform and
uplift as it markedly emphasises the distance between the ‘haves and the
have-nots’ (Jaswal, 2005) and offers ICT enabled development as the panacea for
the problems of unemployment, illiteracy, chronic poverty, etc. This approach is made manifest in the
establishment of Telecentre kiosks, rural BPOs, e-literacy schools and mobile
vans, setting up of mobile and internet technology centres, digitisation of the
state’s resources, digital access centres to important data-sets, initiation of
projects like ‘One Home One Computer’, the e-literacy campaigns, and the
building of special economic zones (SEZ) and IT Corridors under the aegis of
e-governance (Hawks, 2009).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The second approach is
invested in the massive restructuration of the urban spaces to create
infrastructure that attracts foreign investment and ICT enabled multinational
corporations. This approach uses the language of creating a S.M.A.R.T. (Smart,
Moral, Accountable, Responsive, Transparent) State, modelling the new spaces
and politics around the new models of capital modernity (Appadurai, 1996) like
Singapore, Shanghai, Tokyo and Taipei. This model is nuanced by a vocabulary of
‘global citizenship and globalised economy’ (Abbas, 1997), glorifying the new
economic opportunities, flows of foreign capital, enhancement of lifestyle, and
the promise of hypervisibility in the globalisation networks. The building up
of network-neighbourhoods (Doheny-Farina, 1996), spaces of incessant commercial
consumption, post modern digitalised aesthetics of living and housing,
(Mitchell, 1996) infrastructure for ICT augmented lifestyles, spaces for
sculpting hyperspatial bodies, and recreational zones that offer apolitical
aesthetics of living (Chua, 2000), are all a part of this restructuration.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Contemporary analyses
that deploy both these approaches are often contained within the language and
the universes created by these approaches. Studies on e-governance concentrate
on the processes of infrastructure development, the economic parameters of
efficient administration, questions of rights and transparency and impact
analyses of the public private partnership which is at the basis of most e-governance
projects in India. Urban restructuration has found critique from disciplines
that focus largely upon the promissory implementation of State policies, on the
imbalance in the urban eco-systems, the new patterns of migration in the city,
the cultural and class mobility that the new economies offer, and the emergence
of the new middle class that becomes the figurehead of the IT revolution
(Huang, 2005). Most studies look upon technology as incidental or instrumental;
a tool towards an end. The relationship between ICTs and the State, and the
kind of technosocial evolution they produce are generally zones of silence in
most discourse. Both these discourses produce a certain hyper-visual citizen
subject who is either the champion of the new Information societies or the
victim of the digital divide that has ensued.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">ICTs are often posited
as neutral and transparent because they allow us to look at these two kinds of
citizenships on the opposite end of the digital spectrum. It can be argued that
the divides of ICTs are transparent and hence it offers clearly defined spaces
of intervention and uplift. The development sector around the world has
accepted this as a given and hence, along with the Governments, they have also
been urging a blanket development of infrastructure of access to technology for
a particular section of the society, in an attempt to ‘cure’ certain long
standing problems. As in the case of India, China is also fuelled by this
transparency rhetoric, which allows for the production of the power-user versus
the un-networked and has pinned its hopes on the transformative powers of
Internet Technologies. With more than two decades of ICT development in the
country, and especially in spaces like Shanghai-Pudong, behind them, China
seems to be facing a moment of crisis. On the one hand is its promotion and
adoption of internet and digital technologies, which encourages younger users
entering in “schools, colleges, universities and workforces to transform the
economic conditions” (Heng, 2006). On the other hand is the imagination of
these IT forces as transgressive, uncontrollable and in need of constant
supervision in order to retain existing government-citizenship relationships
and power structures. In the middle of this crisis, is another factor that the
obvious suspects and users of technology, who are more under the radar, are not
the people who are deploying technologies for political negotiation and using
technology platforms for political mobilisation. Despite the efforts at
green-washing its technologies and the production of the infamous Great
Fire-wall of China, there has been a sustained use of internet technologies for
resistance and subversion.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The spaces for
subversion rises from the fact that with the making of the IT city, there has
been a complex phenomenon of dislocation and migration, as several communities
were made redundant in the logic of the IT City and were removed from the city.
Many people from these communities re-entered the city as the new IT workforce
after going through a ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘skill building’ to not only be a
part of the IT labour groups but also to support the IT industry in the
construction of the physical infrastructure. Moreover, there has been a steady
flow of anonymous ‘outsiders’ who have found homes in the older nontangs and
factories, and are in the subliminal zones of regulation. As the city is
re-formed to make these people invisible (Abbas, 1997), their leisure space and
time shrink and they find themselves increasingly forming the new prosumers of internet
in Shanghai. However, in the transparency discourse that unfolds, these
populations remain invisible and find spaces of resistance and political
negotiation that their invisible status provides them. The promise of
Invisibility that treats them as Wetware (the biological combination of a
network consisting of Software and Hardware), allows for hope in the otherwise
diminishing spaces of political articulation in a growing authoritarian regime
in China.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><em>Invisibility, Transparency and the
Internet</em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The paper ends by
re-formulating the relationship between the making of an IT City and the way in
which transparency as a rhetoric and technology-as-instrumental method fail to
account for the different kinds of changes that accompany the restructuring of these
cities. On the one hand, there is shrinkage of physical space and built form,
as new forms of technology infrastructure, global lifestyle and late
capitalistic economies expand to fill up the spaces which were earlier
available for political mobilisation, organisation and inhabitation. On the
other, there is a diminishing political landscape, where, with the integration
of the government with the market, there is a tendency to establish larger
regulation and censorship in order to retain the status quo relationship
between the government and the citizen, in the face of massive governance
transition. Both these conditions are produced by the rise and spread of
Information Technologies.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In the process, there
are also only two kinds of citizenships that are addressed by the e-governance
structures which work on a double edge: Firstly, they make the direct access
(defined either by abundance or lack of access) citizenships hyper-visual,
robbing them of nuances and looking upon them as implicated only in the discursive
practices of Internet technologies. Second, they render invisible, the other
supporting structures in order to highlight and focus on the economic
development and growth propelled by the rise of the IT industries. In other
words, they make the citizens who are central to the discourse, invisible, by
treating them as embodiments of the new economic markets and aspirations,
removing them from their traditional contexts, histories and spaces. Moreover,
they make invisible/transparent, populations who are not marked by the aura of
the Internet technologies, in order to bring into focus, the extraordinary
changes – both in the physical built form as well as in the realms of
governance – that have been initiated and accomplished with the making of the IT
City Shanghai-Pudong.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong> </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>References:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Abbas, Ackbar. 1997. <em>Hong Kong: Culture and
the Politics of Disappearance</em>. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University press.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. "The Coming
Community." In <em>Global Culture</em>, edited by Michael Featherstone. London:
Sage.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Feuchtwang, Stephen. 2004. <em>Making Place: State Projects, Globalisation
and Local Responses in China</em>. New York: Routledge Cavendish</p>
<p>Hawks, F.L. 2009. <em>A
Short History of Shanghai: Being an account of the growth and development of
the international settlement</em>.
Beijing: China Intercontinental Press.</p>
<p>Hiibbard, Peter. 2008. The Bund Shanghai : China Faces
the West. Odyssey Books and Guides.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Huang, Tsung-yi Michelle. 2004. <em>Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers :
Illusions of open space in HK, Tokyo and Shanghai</em>. Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Leaf, Michael. 1998. ‘Urban planning and urban
reality under Chinese economic reforms’, <em>Journal of Planning Education and
Research.</em> 18(2): 145–153.</p>
<p>Li,
Heng. 2006. “Behind the Spectacle of Commercial Real Estate,” <em>Xinmin Weekly</em>, 3rd issue (2006)</p>
<p>Mirsky, Jonathan. 2008. <em>The Britannica Guide to Modern China : A comprehensive introduction to
the world’s new economic giant</em>. London: Constable and Robinson Ltd.</p>
<p>Diao
Wenjun, “Analysis of the Present situation and Development Trend of
Hypermarkets in Shanghai,” <em>Shanghai
Articles</em>, 3rd issue (2006)</p>
<p> (STSN)
Shanghai Times Square
Newsletter. 2008. Issue No. 4. Shanghai.</p>
<p>Shu, Kewen. 2006. “the dynastic History of
Tiananmen Square”, <em>Life Week</em>, Issue 11. 27<sup>th</sup> March.</p>
<p>Sicheng, Liang. 1959. “Tiananmen Square”, <em>Architectural
Journal</em> Issue 9-10. pp. 12.</p>
<p>SSY
(<em>Shanghai Statistical Yearbook) 1986</em>,
Shanghai Statistics Bureau, (September, 1986), p18, p412.</p>
<p>SSY(a)
(shanghai Statistical Yearbook) 2005. Shanghai Statistics Bureau. China
Statistics Press. August 2005.</p>
<p>Stanat, Michael. 2005. <em>China’s Generation Y: Understanding the Future Leaders of the World’s
Next Superpower</em>. NY: Homa and Sekey Books.</p>
<p>Tang, Shih-che. 2009. ‘The club and the carrot of
China’s globalization.’ <em>Inter-Asia
Cultural Studies.</em> Volume 10, Number 2. Delhi: Routledge Journals.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Wu, Fulong. 1999. ‘The global and local
dimensions of place-making: remaking Shanghai as a world city’. <em>Urban
Studies</em>, 37(8): 1359–1377.</p>
<p>Xixian, Xu and Xu JianRong. 2004.<em> A Changing Shanghai.</em> Shangai: Shanghai People’s Fine Arts
Publishing House.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Yeung, Yue-man. 1996. <em>Shanghai: Transformation and Modernization Under China's Open Policy.</em>
Shanghai: <span class="addmd">Chinese University Press.<strong></strong></span></p>
<p>Zhang,
Jishun. , “The Linong of Shanghai: the political mobilization of grass-roots
and the trend of national social integration (1950-1955),” <em>Chinese Social Sciences Today</em>, 2nd issue, 2004</p>
<p>Zhang,
Xudong. 2002. “The Construct of Shanghai: Criticism of Urban Idols,
Non-mainstream Writing and the Diminishment of Modern Myths” <em>Literary Review</em>, the 5th edition</p>
<div><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="edn1">
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn1" href="#_ednref1"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[i]</span></span></a> The project wants to emphasize that it is
not attempting a historiography of the building of the IT City of
Shanghai-Pudong. Instead, by drawing selectively, different ways in which the
technology imaginaries (technopolises, intellectual labour, globally homogenous
geographies and time-lines, bodies marked by technology in their material
practices, etc ) of the Internet, find structure and form in the emerging IT
cities in Asia.</p>
</div>
<div id="edn2">
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn2" href="#_ednref2"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[ii]</span></span></a> Zhang Chunqiao, Secretary
of the Culture and Education Department of the Shanghai Municipal
Committee who accompanied DuBois to
Shanghai Mansion, specially mentioned DuBois’ visit in an article entitled “To
Climb the New Summit of Victory.”.</p>
</div>
<div id="edn3">
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn3" href="#_ednref3"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[iii]</span></span></a> In 1994, one Shanghai
government officer stated, “the government plans to remove or close down two
thirds of the factories located within [the range of] 106 square kilometers
from the city centre, namely, within the Inner Ring Road.”.<em> </em>Due to different reasons (one of
the main reasons is the increase of transferee cost because unsolved problems,
such as the proper placement of a large number of former workers, have been
bundled with the factory buildings and factory land), some factories still
remain in their original places, although most of them have already stopped
manufacturing and the workers dismissed. The industrial life/space has
disappeared with the disappearance of the factories. Ruins of this life/space
become some sort of commodity only because the land under the ruins still has
some value.</p>
</div>
<div id="edn4">
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn4" href="#_ednref4"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[iv]</span></span></a> On the day (1 October
1949) of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong suggested
rebuilding Tiananmen Square and making it a “grand and magnificent square.” See
(Kewen, 2006). Liang Sicheng, who always insisted on preserving the old Beijing
and opposed massive makeover, finally realized that the makeover was never
about architecture but about politics: “As for the scale of Tiananmen Square …
apart from considering the scale of man as a biological being and the scale of
construction appropriate to the man’s physiology, we should also take into
account the scale for the great collective requested by the political men in
the new society.” Liang, 1959, pp 12).</p>
</div>
<div id="edn5">
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn5" href="#_ednref5"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[v]</span></span></a> The People’s Square,
transformed in 1953 from the original racecourse (which was nationalized in
1951 by the Municipal Military Control Commission), surrounded by woods, and
paved with tiled and cemented floor, is the largest public space in Shanghai
and can accommodate over one million people. The Sino-Russian Friendship
Building, which was built in 1955 and was covering an area of 80,000 square
meters, was the city’s largest building after the liberation of Shanghai and
still ranks top in terms of its indoor space in today’s Shanghai. The Cultural
Plaza, transformed in 1952 from the Greyhound Racecourse, had 12,500 seats and
was the largest indoor hall in Shanghai.</p>
</div>
<div id="edn6">
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn6" href="#_ednref6"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[vi]</span></span></a> It is a unique store that
sells boiled water in Shanghai.</p>
</div>
<div id="edn7">
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn7" href="#_ednref7"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[vii]</span></span></a> Shanghai’s housing
shortage started in the early 20th century instead of the 1950s. The living
space within Shanghai city is 16,100,000 square meters in total but 3.9 square
meters per capita. During the 32 years from 1952 to 1985, 21,720,000 square
meters of housing were built within the city and the registered population
increased from 5,300,000 to 6,980,000. The housing shortage was still serious
since by 1985, the living space had only reached 5.4 square meters per capita.
(SSY, 1986). What needs to be clarified is that the statics of 1949 does not
include the shabby slum houses commonly referred to as “gun di long.” </p>
</div>
<div id="edn8">
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn8" href="#_ednref8"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[viii]</span></span></a> This is an increasingly popular
new word in Shanghai over the last 20 years, which refers to the people who
come from other provinces, especially the rural areas, and live in Shanghai but
do not have permanent residence in Shanghai. According to the Shanghai
Statistics Bureau’s report on March 2006, the immigrating labor population in
Shanghai was 3,750,000. 2,840,000 of this population is in the manufacturing,
construction, retail, and catering industry and engaged in low-income manual
work. The immigrating population should be over 4 million if the large number
of people (such as those in the household service business) and their children
be taken into calculation. </p>
</div>
<div id="edn9">
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn9" href="#_ednref9"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[ix]</span></span></a> In Shanghai, the floor
area of shops has increased seven-fold from 4,030,000 square meters in 1990 to
2,857,000 square meters in 2004 and that of hotels has increased three-fold
from 6,580,000 square meters in 1990 to 2,204,000 square meters in 2004. The
increase of commercial space is even greater if that of commercial office
buildings is calculated as well. (SSY(a), 2005, pp. 198)</p>
</div>
<div id="edn10">
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn10" href="#_ednref10"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[x]</span></span></a> Take the area around
Zhongshan Park for example, although it was one of the earliest developed
leisure areas in Shanghai, there was only one small department store in the
mid-1980s and the retail business developed slowly. However, within these ten
years, with the completion of Zhongshan Park Station along the subway line 2
and light rail line 3, five multi-story shopping malls have been built, all
within a radius of 500 meters. The newest among them is a 58-storey building
with four levels of basement and nine levels of shopping mall.</p>
</div>
<div id="edn11">
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn11" href="#_ednref11"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xi]</span></span></a> By the end of 2005,
hypermarkets measuring over 5000 square meters within Shanghai have reached 97
and 28 more have chosen their locations and would be opened soon. Because of a
large number of hypermarkets and the intense competition brought about, a
considerable number of them mainly profit from land appreciation rather than
from retail. </p>
</div>
<div id="edn12">
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn12" href="#_ednref12"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xii]</span></span></a> By the end of 2005, the
commercial real estate in Shanghai has reached a total of 2,900,000 square
meters with 2.6 square meters per capita, far exceeding Hong Kong’s 1.2 square
meters per capita.</p>
</div>
<div id="edn13">
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn13" href="#_ednref13"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xiii]</span></span></a> Barely 6 million square
meters in 1990, the floor area of office buildings in Shanghai reached a total
of 4,012,000 square meters in 2004. See <em>Shanghai
Statistical Yearbook 2005</em>. Edited by Shanghai Statistics Bureau, published
by China Statistics Press in August 2005, p 198. The statistical material on
the increase of floor area of commercial office building cannot be found for
the present. Even if the material were obtained, it would not be enough since a
large area of commercial office building has been rented by many state-owned
monopoly agencies. However, the expansion of government office space is great
even if it take up only one tenth of the space of office buildings. </p>
</div>
<div id="edn14">
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn14" href="#_ednref14"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[xiv]</span></span></a> Such phenomenon exists
not only in Shanghai but all over the country, especially in cities and towns
of low economic level. The towering and luxurious government, bank, taxation,
and police buildings create an ironic contrast with the low and shabby
constructions close by. </p>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/finalpaper'>http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/finalpaper</a>
</p>
No publishernishantShanghaiCyberculturesArchitectureCensorshipCommunities2012-08-10T08:33:48ZBlog EntryThe Future of the Moving Image
http://editors.cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/future-of-the-moving-image
<b>All dissimilar technologies are the same in their own way, but all similar technologies are uniquely different. This was probably at the core of the zeitgeist at the international seminar on “The Future of Celluloid” hosted by the Media Lab at the Jadavpur University, Kolkata, at which Nishant Shah, Director - Research CIS, presented a research paper. Practitioners, film makers, artists, theoreticians and academics, blurring the boundaries of both their roles and their disciplines and areas of interest, came together to move beyond convergence theories – to explore the continuities, conflations, contestations and confusions that Internet Technologies have led to for earlier technologies, but specifically for the technology of the moving image.</b>
<h2 align="left"> How Digital Cinema changes the notion of authorship...<br /></h2>
<p>The
concerns that emerged at the <a class="external-link" href="http://medialabju.org/about.html">Jadavpur University Media Lab</a>'s international seminar on The Future of Celluloid, were manifold and not confined to cinema or the moving image. These are
concerns that are voiced on all realms of cultural production, where
the traditional forms feel stranded at digital
intersections, threatened by the emergence of new cultural
productions which are so much more quintessentially the form and ideal
that the traditional forms aspired to.</p>
<p>The blog, as we saw at the
“<a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/the-anxiety-of-the-future-and-internet-technologies" class="external-link">Writing the Future Conference</a>” was seen as a threat and more
fundamentally replacing the novel form. Ars electronica or digital music has long since played the swan song of traditional
orchestration practices. Similarly, the digital film (often broadcast
on video sharing spaces like YouTube and MySpace) or even mainstream
feature films that embody digital technologies of hypervisualisation, show necessarily more than celluloid could ever capture. As <a class="external-link" href="http://www.cscsarchive.org/Members/ashish">Ashish
Rajadhyaksha</a> pointed out, “The capacity to pay almost infinite
attention to the celluloid image was made possible only with the
digitisation of the celluloid image”.</p>
<p>Through
the different presentations, this strain of thought was apparent – will we
lose celluloid altogether? Is the future of cinema going to be in
infantile pre-lapsarian representations of smiling/dancing/gurgling
babies and furry pets made by indulgent mothers and doting pet
owners? When cinema transitions from deep celluloid to shallow
pixels, will the loss in depth also result in the death of meaning
and processes of reading the image? And finally, the question
that seems to surface, sometimes in the guise of academic concern,
sometimes in the shape of alarm and anxiety, and sometimes in the
form of paranoia and raging uncertainty: “Is this the end of
Celluloid? “ to which <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Hanson">Matt Hanson</a>, who presented his open source film <a class="external-link" href="http://aswarmofangels.com/">A Swarm of Angels</a>, nuancedly added: "Only the end of celluloid as we know it!”</p>
<p>In my presentation titled ´Of Pranksters, Jesters and Clowns –
YouTube Videos and Conditions of Collaborative Authorship´ I made a
call to identify these questions as symptomatic of another more deep
seated anxiety which makes for a fundamental revisiting of the
relationship between the author, the text and the reader. Looking
particularly at YouTube videos and the kind of arguments that have
surrounded them – on copyright, defamation, plagiarism, piracy,
sampling, remix, authorship, ownership – I proposed that at the
centre of all these anxieties is the question of authorship, what
constitutes it and the need to expand the scope of authorship
by looking at the series of engagements that happen online.</p>
<p> I presented two cases to make my argument. The first was the case
of <a class="external-link" href="http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=N1KfJHFWlhQ">13-month-old Holden Lenz</a>, dancing to Prince’s
<em>Let’s Go Crazy.</em> In February 2007, Stephanie Lenz’s
family had a digital equivalent of a Kodak moment. Her 13-month-old son Holden, pushing a walker across her kitchen floor,
started moving to the addictive rhythms of Prince’s <em>Let’s Go
Crazy </em>song and Stephanie recorded him on her
digicam. Wanting more of the family to share the joy, she uploaded
the video on to YouTube and it was viewed scores of times. Laughs
were shared, gaps were bridged, digital technologies brought
families scattered across time-zones and lifestyles together.</p>
<p>However, the lawyers at
Universal Music did not seem to share the enthusiasm or the joy. They fired off a notice to YouTube asking them to remove the video because
it amounted to a copyright infringement. YouTube, fearing legal ramifications, removed the video. Stephanie Lenz approached the
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which challenged Universal’s
claims that held Lenz liable for up to 150,000 USD in fines for
sharing the 29 seconds of her son dancing. While it is very easy to
draw the battle-lines and look upon the well educated, highly paid
lawyers of Universal as ‘idiots’ who spent probably millions of
dollars in starting the legal battle, I think there is more at play
here than who is right and who is wrong. What is really being
debated, is not whether Lenz indulged in wilful copyright
infringement or not, but the questions of who is an author, what are
the mechanisms of attribution, and how do we understand these in the
complex digital worlds that we populate?</p>
<p>Historically, the author
was constructed as a communitarian figure whose work depended on and
was enhanced by the collaborations and the collective knowledge of
the people s/he interacted with. Chaucer, to quote the most canonical
example, for instance, was recognised as the author of <em>The Canterbury
Tales</em> only after the print industry finds its footing, thus
neglecting the fact that the text was heavily distorted, enhanced,
mutated, corrected, revised, edited and transformed by the various
users of the manuscripts, who were not merely audience or receptors
but also collaborative authors of the text. It is only with the
establishment of the cultural industries, that such a fluid
understanding of authorship gets crystalised into specific forms of
engagement, where the author, the reader, the distributor, the
consumer, the audience and the end user are all clearly defined and
contained within presumed roles.</p>
<p>It is the blurring of these
boundaries in the digital world that leads to the kind of debates
that we observe around the Stephanie Lenz case. The inability of the
newly emerging digital cultural industry to recognise different forms
of engagement – remixing, sampling, embedding, referencing,
distributing, editing, etc. – as creative and productive forms of
authorship is at the basis of the anxieties that run amok in these
debates. My presentation made a call for not only a
de-criminalisation of pirate positions in the realm of cultural
production, but also to recognise and celebrate the various
conditions of collaborative authorship – be it by Holden Lenz who
probably made the song twice as popular than it was, or by <a class="external-link" href="http://www.avrilbandaids.com/">Avril
Lavigne fans </a>who went on a spree to make her song <em>Girlfriend, </em> the
first video to be viewed one million times on Youtube – not merely
as derivative or acts of prank and jests, but as legitimate and
distinctive forms of authorship which expand the scope of the
cultural object and give it unprecedented layers of meaning and
engagement.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/future-of-the-moving-image'>http://editors.cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/future-of-the-moving-image</a>
</p>
No publishernishantinternet and societyPiracyIntellectual Property RightsYouTubeinternet artCyberculturesNew Pedagogies2008-11-11T09:06:57ZBlog EntryThe Binary: City and Nature
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/the-binary
<b>A continuation of the last post wherein I am looking at various other representation of the city in both classical and popular medium, today I am writing my views on the analysis of certain Miniature paintings.</b>
<p>You might think why do I not come to the point of looking at the Internet and the City ? I am trying here to look at generic aspects of representation of 'cities' in other mediums as well. The aim would be to understand both historical as well as contemporary popular patterns in such representations. Other mediums such as cinema, television and print are well documented and one could look into secondary studies to understand patterns within representation of space in general and city in particular. So a first hand study of various miniature paintings, can help us tease out the issues associated around representation of space. I am assuming the conceptual basis of a representation might be same irrespective of medium or sometimes even time period. For example, I have listed out how the juxtaposing of different context in one fictitious representation in street posters is an important phenomenon that aims at lifting the present state of imagination to a different level/ world whereby creating a condition far removed from the context of its production but still very much part of us. See the first report for an elaborate account of posters and textbook representations.</p>
<p>Miniature paintings of various schools within India (Rajasthan, Kangra, Madhubani) have been an important documentation on the life and times of the place and its people. I have picked up the Rajasthani Miniature tradition to try and understand issues around representation of the city. Let me clarify on what I mean when I refer to a “city”.</p>
<p><strong>City as a Cultural Concept</strong>: A settlement with its houses, streets, public buildings and markets, etc., is the stage for a complex social, economic and political negotiations. It is the arena where individual and groups are constantly engaged in charting, modifying and testing ideas of production in material or non-material terms. It is the place, where people with different skills, varied cultural background and divergent belief systems come together to forge a common identity and yet retaining something of their own connecting them back to their “native” town. Yes, it is still not very uncommon to be asked about ones “native” in public schools in India.. A question that tries to locate you with your region irrespective of your present identity. This meliu of different people, contradictory systems and varied aspirations creates a state of constant negotiations and flux that gives rise to what we call as the ingenuity of a city; be it arts, literature, engineering, performance or governance. So city really is not about size or spread or population. It is really about a set of relationship that shows immense complex attributes of social and material culture in a limited space.</p>
<h2>Readings from Miniature Paintings</h2>
<h3>Imagined Geometry in a City</h3>
<p>Cities are represented through use of geometry; a man-made system to organize and visualize the surroundings. Geometry becomes the basis to attain clarity. With the absence of perspective, the use of geometry becomes even more creative and division of paintings into various planes allows immense variation of expressions. But part of the city like streets, sidewalks, palaces, houses are all neatly placed in geometrical orthogonal planes. The character of the space is then attained not by photographic representation but juxtaposing and shifting of planes. The reliance of geometry for creation of the image is not only utilitarian but symbolic as well. It is in fact a statement on how they perceive the city and the surrounding nature. <strong>Geometry complements what is missing in nature.</strong> A visual order that is <strong>predictable and symbolic of the human will</strong> in face of harsh unforgiving surroundings.</p>
<p>Thus, the creative play of planes creates <strong>a sense of illusion, mystery and spontaneity usually associated with Indian cities</strong>. These paintings are a good example of non realistic expressions of the space that capture the spirit of the place from both spatial and cultural perspective. The <strong>question of modes of spatial representation and its relationship with the physical space</strong> is one that even concerns our study when we discuss how cities are represented on the Internet.</p>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span">
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<th>Figure 1 Geometric Clarification </th>
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<td> <img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Figure1.jpg/image_preview" alt="Geometric Clarification" class="image-inline" title="Geometric Clarification" /></td>
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<h3>Nature and the City</h3>
<p>Similar to the search in posters, I tried to look for a very fundamental relationship of cities with nature in the Miniature painting traditions. It becomes very obvious, while pouring through different painting styles of India that city and nature were posited in a binary relationship. Nature is the anti-thesis to the city. Nature was wild with dense forests, dark clouds, water and animals whereas cities were organized by citizens.</p>
<table class="plain">
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<th>Figure 2 Representation of Nature</th>
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<td> <img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Figure2.jpg/image_preview" alt="Representation of Nature" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Representation of Nature" /></td>
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<th>Figure 3 The Binary: City and Nature</th>
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<td> <img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Figure3.jpg/image_preview" alt="The Binary: City and Nature" class="image-inline image-inline" title="The Binary: City and Nature" /></td>
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<p><br />Nature was also the ground for forays by men and their army or the acetic but they all came back to the city. So <strong>city was the refuge</strong> for mankind and its civilization. Nature was wild, rich and also unpredictable. But still there are patterns in nature that humans understand; the waves of the water, the vegetation cover of the trees, the dance of the rains. <strong>Cities were the viewpoints from where nature that exists outside were seen.</strong> The dichotomy of the city and the surrounding forms the backdrop of most visual expression dealing with the space.</p>
<p><em>All pictures from Garden of Cosmos, The Royal paintings of Jodhpur. Thames and Hudson Publication</em>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/the-binary'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/the-binary</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaCybercultures2011-08-02T06:05:53ZBlog EntrySexuality, Queerness and Internet technologies in Indian context
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/queer-histories-of-the-internet/sexuality-queerness-and-internet-technologies-in-indian-context
<b>This blog post lays out the discursive construction of sexuality and queerness as intelligible domains in the Indian context while engaging with ideas of visibility, representation, exclusion, publicness, criminality, difference, tradition, experience, and community that have come into use with the critical responses to queer identities and practices in India. </b>
<h2>In Brief</h2>
<p>To understand the relationship between queerness and Internet technologies we must start with a critical analysis of what ‘queer’ inaugurates in the Indian context and to think forward from there with the technological— a thinking forward that is removed from a purely calculable instrumentality. What we will in this post try to argue is that practices of same-sex love in the Indian context operates through a setting up of sexual and nonsexual spaces for expression of same-sex desires and towards the end of this post attempt to delineate instances in the spatial domain of cyber space where this enframing is revealed. Simultaneously we will also then set up the critically queer as a mode of encountering and negotiating the domain of the sexual in the nonsexual.</p>
<h2>Sexuality in the Indian context</h2>
<p>The last four decades has seen the particular reiteration of the ‘gender and sexuality’ frame in the social sciences in India. As Mary E John and Janaki Nair in their introduction to ‘A Question of Silence’ note, sexuality since the 1980s “tended to condense into the more specific question of sexual preference associated with identity politics of the gay and lesbian communities.” The claim has been that this discourse has, in the Foucauldian sense, led to structuring the possible field of the action of people. This emergence of the sexuality question in India has not come with a rigorous examination of ‘sexuality’ as an intelligible domain in the Indian context. Here domain refers to a discursive space that is contingent on the theoretical existence of certain phenomena. Queer studies in the west have set up sexuality as a domain that cuts across social disciplines. As Eve Sedgwick puts it, "[A]n understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition." (Epistemology of the Closet, 1990) The question, then, is if this condition of analysis is also true for the non-West.</p>
<p>The emergence of gay and lesbian politics in India is tied to a development discourse that saw in the post-stonewall assertion of sexuality identities a radical potential that was, as yet, missing in the Indian context. The mushrooming of support groups as noted in Shakuntala Devi’s book ‘The World of Homosexuals’ as far back as the 1980s notes the critical function of pedagogy that they performed by creating a discourse of sexuality and identity. This is evidenced even today when people who introduce their homosexual orientation by describing it as a field they entered at a particular point in their lives are corrected to describe it ‘accurately’ as an orientation in the identitarian sense of the word; our Marxist legacies pointing to a false consciousness of their own experience and locating practices firmly within the domain of sexuality. Similarly an assertion that uses the phrase ‘doing gay sex’ is corrected to ‘being gay’. Another instance where practices are seen as inhering in identity is the familiar scene of a practicing homosexual man or woman who has pointed out the schizophrenic nature of being married to the opposite sex while still continuing to do ‘gay sex’. In fact, most, frameworks of peer counselling set up in the metros are infused with various degrees of pathologisations that reify identity ignoring aspects of social relations altogether.</p>
<p>The new left project that is best exemplified in the writings of John D Emilio— that attempted a structural approach to oppression based on sexuality by looking at the heterosexual family as an institution that reproduces capitalist ideology in the modern world, also gains currency in the field of resistance that marks rights based sexuality activism in India which draws much from an already existing global network of Marxist thinking and practice. In this argument heterosexual coupling is seen as the primary institution that disciplines us into the binaries of male and female sexed subject positions through a fixing of the woman as mother and wife valuing them as reproducers of labourers over their production as labourers and a containment of male sexuality through monogamy and normative heterosexuality wherein homosexuality is then seen as being disruptive of this reproduction of the form of sexual economy that is both a product of and reproduces modern capitalism.</p>
<p>Emerging from these constructions was also another academic procedure in the construction of homosexualities outside the west which was to discover a tradition of same-sex relations. Geeti Thadani’s Sakhiyani: L<em>esbian Desire in Ancient and Modern India</em> and Ruth Vanitha and Saleem Kidwai’s <em>Same-Sex Love in India</em> are examples of this. Geeti Thadani poses a pre-modern utopia of gynefocal same-sex love between women (named lesbian as well) that were put paid to by Islam, colonialism and shifts in Hinduism.</p>
<p><em>Same-sex Love in India</em> explicitly seeks to tackle the contemporary claim that homosexual behaviours are alien imports from the west. Even when they speak of passion, erotic emotion, love as opposed to sex, shame as opposed to guilt they rarely set out to explain these in terms of social relations and construct these ideas as pre-colonial realities that are disrupted by colonial modernity. The authors state in their introduction about the work’s mission to “help assure homo-erotically inclined Indians that large numbers of their ancestors throughout history and in all parts of the country shared their inclinations and were honoured and successful members of the society who contributed in major ways to thought, literature and their general good. These people were not regarded as inferior in any way nor were they always ashamed of their loves or desires. In many cases they lived happy and fulfilling lives with those that they loved.”</p>
<h2>The <em>Khoti</em> and the <em>Hijra</em></h2>
<p>The search for indigenous categories has also led us to the <em>kothi</em> and the <em>hijra</em>. Categories marked as traditional and remainders, we are told, of the pre-colonial and pre-modern. The <em>hijra</em> is offered two possible positions. A possible translation through a transnational medico-legal discourse into the transsexual or the inter-sexed or under a cultural citizenship model into the institutionalised or culturally intelligible tradition of a third gender, who are, to quote Serena Nanda, “…neither male nor female but contain elements of both”.</p>
<p>In medical science the becoming of the <em>hijra</em> is explained as a gender identity disorder— a confusion over the apparent misfit between biological sex (of which there are only two) and a psychological true gender (again only two). Biological men who identify themselves as women are <em>hijras</em>— an identification that is made possible only through institutionalised relationships of power, in particular the power of relegation, which psychiatric discourse in India too reproduces to a large extent.</p>
<p>Narratives of <em>hijras</em> who state that if they only knew that men could have sex with other men as men then they would not have opted for castration is something we would find hard to illuminate in the translations effected on these bodies by the present categorisations of hijraness as transgender/transsexual/M2F/third gender all of which fundamentally cannot allow for such a claim. Such a narrative is a question posed in relation to knowledge about ‘gayness’ as identity and more importantly as the visibly dominant identity within the broad spectrum of alternatives. The medico-legal discourse of course now can jump in, and who is to say that it hasn’t already, to claim that the scientific knowledge that enables them to recognise gender identity disorder would have prevented such misrecognition and the ensuing decision to castrate.</p>
<p>So from a colonial practice that saw <em>hijras</em> as a criminal tribe and criminalised emasculation in 1888 and later also listed emasculation in the IPC as a criminal offence we have now a medical science that claims for itself to be the sole arbiter of gender identity. The many stories of the violence of medical practices that rarely grant recognition of gender identity disorder for years on end and instead identify a horde of other psychological illnesses such as schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder, etc as the true disorder are but indicative of the substantive ways in which such knowledge systems affect lives. We still need to consider if epistemic force fields have no effect whatsoever in relation to the modernisation of these categories as distinct identities in relation to the state?</p>
<p>The <em>kothi </em>is understood both as synonymous with <em>hijra</em> and as an attribute of hijraness. The <em>kothi</em> is also the <em>hijra</em> prior to nirvan, the castration experienced as generative of hijraness. That is to say that kothiness is what makes intelligible a <em>hijra</em> where kothiness would be that very set of acts that is often characterised by, to quote Serena Nanda, “adopting feminine mannerisms, taking on women’s names and using female kinship terms and a special, feminised vocabulary…they use coarse and abusive speech and gestures in opposition to the Hindu ideal of demure and restrained femininity”. Kothiness is in many ways all this and more but the kothi is defined for us today solely through the optics of penetration.</p>
<p>The <em>kothi</em> as identity is today strengthened and discursively constituted by the strategies of the HIV/AIDS industry and various NGOs. If we are to trace movements in HIV/AIDS discourses on same-sex attraction we will find a replication of the very same models we set out earlier. Initial interventions in this regard like those of the ABVA and Humsafar trust saw ‘gayness’ as a possible identity through which HIV strategies in this regard could form. An invocation of visibility versus invisibility was stressed which pushed forth the idea that the homosexual as population that was presently under a false consciousness will first have to group themselves under the identity ‘gay’ from where a protracted politics of position will enable the end of oppression on the basis of sexuality in particular through a relationship with HIV/AIDs much like it happened in the west through groups such as ACT-UP. It was also supposed that these identities based on sexual orientation could, now empowered, decide that they are not gay but some ‘x’ identity where ‘x’ becomes a culturally translatable, and indeed culturally intelligible, term for gayness.</p>
<p>Another position that was rhetorically differentiated from this orientation/identity model was another model of HIV strategic framing of India as a truly ‘queer’ space where the western categorisation of identities based on sexual orientation do not and indeed cannot exist (exemplified in the writings and statements of Shivananda Khan of Naz Foundation International.) This framework in denouncing sexual orientation as a culturally intelligible characteristic posits gender identity as the organising principle of male to male sexual encounters in India. The <em>kothi</em>, the <em>panthi</em> and the <em>dupli</em> are then pointed out as proof of this theory by a process of defining these categories. The <em>kothi</em> becomes the woman identified performer of femininity who takes on the passive penetrated role in sex and who only desires the <em>panthi</em>, the active non-feminine male identified. The <em>dupli</em> is then presumably within such a logic placed as someone who desires both the active and passive roles like the bisexual self who is characterised through an essential desire for both orientations/sexes.</p>
<p>It becomes clear that both these seemingly diverse positions are engaged in the discursive construction of a specific notion of sexualities as object choice positions where the object of desire is framed within the sameness/difference, male/female model and as identity.</p>
<p>What these moves do not explain is why these identities take their particular forms of expression here. Instead what we have is only an enumeration of new categories with the discovery of newer non-heterosexual practices.</p>
<h2>Critically Queer</h2>
<p>The post 1990s saw the emergence of the critically queer which at its most rigorous was theorised as a breaking out of heterosexual iterations of power. At its heart was the Foucauldian historicising of sexuality as an accumulating domain in the West beginning from the Roman period to the Western modern. We suggest that a similar accretion of the social domain into the domain of sexuality never takes place here and what instead accumulates is a mode of separating same-sex sociality into sexual and non-sexual domains with the scope of regulation restricting itself to this separation as opposed to the repression hypothesis that Foucault proffers for the West, which is not only to say that a range of sexual practices are performative to the extent that they mark out for themselves a separate domain of sociality for the sexual but also that identity has little or no part to play in this performative.</p>
<p>Let us look at two particular instances in everyday LGBT sociality to highlight this separation of domains.</p>
<p>Many of the male support groups that were set up in the formative years of what is being referred to as the LGBT movement in India emerge from public or privately created sexual spaces and over the years has seen an active regulation of this space to keep out the sexual. This mode of being is even evidenced online when a new member to an online forum set up for LGBT people expresses a sexual desire. Other members of the group almost immediately ask him to refrain from expressing his sexual desires in this space and suggest instead a networking site like ‘Planet Romeo’ for “such activities”. The last decade also saw the rise of parties, aimed at increasing visibility, that are organised for gay identified men in Mumbai, Bangalore or Delhi that often follow a strict <strong>no drag no sex rule</strong> which also includes self-policing of all toilets. So we have men dressed within clearly regulated notions of how men should dress who are dancing, whereas even two decades ago stories of parties organised similarly did not have these rules. The Bangalore <em>karaga</em> for instance allows for not just cross-dressing but also same-sex sexual encounters and that too in public spaces as opposed to the private spaces where entry is regulated. There are of course differences between the two but the point is that we are increasingly expected to accept as natural and necessary for the greater common gayhood these limits that we impose on ourselves and our actions.</p>
<p>This frame of marking out a separation between sexual and non-sexual sociality might better explain the various levels of incomprehension exhibited in the recent case of professor Ramchandra Srinivas Siras. Professor Srinivas Ramchandra Siras of the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) was found dead just days after the Allahabad High Court ordered his reinstatement to his position as reader and chairman of the department of Modern Indian languages from which he had been summarily dismissed by AMU authorities on the basis of misconduct. The misconduct in question being Siras’s perfectly legal act of having consensual sex with another adult man within the privacy of his allotted living quarters on campus. The legal act was shot on tape by three sting-crazed citizen-journalists who violently broke into his house, followed by the AMU proctor, deputy proctor, media advisor and public relations officer. AMU’s decision to suspend Siras came significantly seven months after the Delhi High Court legalized consensual homosexual sex. Most accounts of LGBT activism relate this narrative as one of homophobia, despite the fact that a fact finding team of sexuality activists note that almost everyone they spoke to in the university knew that Professor Siras was sexually attracted to men for the last 22 years that he has taught there or for that matter that the university has also thrown out lecturers who chose to break any similar sexual code like marrying outside of their religion.</p>
<p>One would be hard-pressed to find a similar narrative in the West. One can argue that AMU authorities acted with a moral outrage only in relation to the tape that suddenly threatened the sanctity of this marked space of Siras’ private sexual act that had through its capture in public technology threatened to enter the non-sexual realm. If we are able to look at this event through the lens suggested then we have a better explanation for the long-term acknowledgement of Siras’s sexual practices and the ways in which any transgression of this space (here forcibly induced by the violent intrusion into Siras’s room and the recording of acts marked out constantly as sexual. A condemning of the violence of intrusion into Siras’s home, while being both important and necessary, does not in any way address the rigidity of the marking out of sexual and non-sexual fields. A demand for privacy in this context, as is seen in the instance of legal activism against and shift effected in section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, we suggest, operates in keeping these two fields distinct and does not challenge, in any way, the separation of the two domains. It is precisely in this transgression of fields that we wish to locate the project of the critically queer and the question of the technological.</p>
<p><strong>Gender and Sexuality: A note</strong>: <em>We want to flag here that while we agree that gender is a domain available for understanding social practice and identity its link to sexuality is not implicit. We will take this up at length in future. </em></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/queer-histories-of-the-internet/sexuality-queerness-and-internet-technologies-in-indian-context'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/queer-histories-of-the-internet/sexuality-queerness-and-internet-technologies-in-indian-context</a>
</p>
No publisherNithin ManayathCybercultures2019-09-18T14:08:52ZBlog EntrySeparating the 'Symbiotic Twins'
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/queer-histories-of-the-internet/symbiotic-twins
<b>This post tries to undo the comfortable linking that has come to exist in the ‘radical’ figure of the cyber-queer. And this is so not because of a nostalgic sense of the older ways of performing queerness, or the world of the Internet is fake or unreal in comparison to bodily experience, and ‘real’ politics lies elsewhere. This is so as it is a necessary step towards studying the relationship between technology and sexuality.</b>
<p>Here, I would like to deal with ‘openness’ as an idea that seems to structure discussions on the nature of both the Internet and queerness, in different ways. What does it mean to read an object/phenomenon/practice as signalling the acts of opening? What is opening placed in opposition to? The terms that come together to constitute the <em>field of openness</em>, so to speak, are these – transparency, publicness, privacy, safety, freedom, expression, anonymity (not so paradoxically), communication, virtuality on the one hand and opacity on the other, the closet, danger, morality, prohibition, lack of access and real life.</p>
<p>‘Openness’ is seen as the fundamental principle of the Internet. [1] The ramifications of this statement for Internet studies and by extension for studies on the ‘cyber queer’ or on the implications of Internet technology for alternative sexuality practices are then the concern of this post. What does this idea refer itself to in terms of how we live in the world? It refers to:</p>
<ul>
<li>communication – the idea that with the Internet, communication has broken free of the temporal, spatial, linguistic and national restrictions imposed by earlier technologies; </li>
<li>space – that space is no longer defined in material terms and the binary or inside/outside and public/private, has been radically recast by the entry into our lives of ‘cyberspace’ and of space thought of in virtual terms;</li>
<li>body – dematerialization, disembodiment, terms that imply that on the Internet, you become an entity of the mind and of a desire that does not need the material body. The implications of this then being that the threat to the body, posed by its circulation in ‘real’ space and time, is now reduced, because that body no longer has as much at stake as the mind does, in the world of virtual technology. It also means release from a body that is encumbered by class difference and the various ‘markers’ of social relations;</li>
<li>decentralization – that the Internet adopts the mode of ‘weaving’, which is seen as a refusal of hierarchisation, the kind imposed by the ways in which information is made available, or production and consumption are managed, the ways in which class, race and gender restrict the ways in which individuals ‘participate’. Weaving then refers to a network system in place of a top-down system. </li>
</ul>
<p>“The evidence of the trend towards openness is all around. Young people are sharing their lives online via Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Google, and whatever comes next. Though that mystifies their elders and appalls self-appointed privacy advocates, the transparent generation gains value from its openness. This is how they find each other, share, and socialize.”[2] (Jeff Jarvis, author of What would Google do?). We are henceforth titled the ‘transparent generation’, and we find the same value in the technology that defines our lives – the Internet. Why we are ‘transparent’ when compared to earlier generations? ‘Transparent’, ‘strawberry’, etc., are all terms that have come to describe the present generation of Internet users, the youth, a category born out of an idea of freedom from both moral and political constraint. In this imagination of them, they use technology in order to gain this freedom, in order to give their minds and bodies, which are straining at the leash, the required escape routes, from institutions (family, school and legal systems), from social relations (class and sexuality), and earlier forms of political identification.</p>
<p>The 90s was seen as the decade of openness, both in terms of new media technology and sexual practice. “With liberalisation sweeping the Indian mindset, more and more people are determined to enjoy the secret thrills sex has to offer. While high-profile executives are being seduced by escort services, the middle-class minds are being titillated by 'parties'. Those who are more discreet go for phone sex or MMS.”[3] What comes across is an idea of a new relationship to the temporal and the spatial, the cultural and the social. And sexuality seems to be central to this relationship. “A sexual revolution is sweeping through the small and big towns of India, and to stay immune to it is a big (t)ask.”[4] This article from The Week tells us how the ‘new sexual’ or the ‘newly sexual’ is described in popular discourse. So much so that the violence of the right-wing groups against women and against ‘obscene’ texts are sometimes explained through this very revolution of/in sex. It is read as a backlash, in a moment that is producing this new relationship, with the help of new media technologies such as the mobile phone, the Internet, the web camera and the ‘things’ that enable this openness. And because it is read as a backlash, the practices of the Hindu right are read as wishing to <em>close</em>, to reverse this process of opening out and to keep things <em>as they used to be</em>. Openness is not just a set of practices; it is read as a mindset, a shift from an older era of being bound within certain social structures. “Earlier only newly married women had the right, indeed were expected, to advertise their sexuality before receding into wall-flowers as respectable married women but today all that has changed….Walk into any college or even a school campus across the country and you have young men and women equating liberation and sexuality” (Patricia Uberoi). The linking of sexuality and liberation or freedom is here crucial, because what is particular to this era is the fact that ‘sexual expression’ is seen an indicator of freedom, whether this freedom is placed against moral or political orthodoxies, or on the other hand posited as Westernisation. Popular discourse reveals us as having arrived at the desire for sexual freedom (whether or not sexual freedom itself).</p>
<p><em>Queerness</em>, a phenomenon of the 90s in the Indian context, is similarly described as an <em>opening out</em>. ‘Queer’ signifies a stepping out of the binary of heterosexuality/homosexuality, which will no longer encumber the body or the mind. It is a conscious move away from identities like lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, in fact identity in itself is rendered fragmented and cannot emerge from a monolithic location.</p>
<p>“There was excitement and apprehension in the early '90s as an endless diversity of images flowed into private and public spaces…. Sexual speech came under special attention as newscasts, talk shows, sitcoms and a variety of TV shows challenged conventional family values and sexual normativity including monogamy, marriage and heterosexuality” (Shohini Ghosh – “The Closet is Ajar”, in Outlook[6]). Queerness is then linked to this rapid spread, this breathless circulation, this new access. Technological change is inextricably tied to this idea of the closet being ajar. “…the rapid spread of satellite TV and new media technologies continue to transform the cultural practices of the urban middle class.” It seems to be an era in which the boundaries of the sexual norm are being forced to redraw themselves, simply by the massive onslaught of ideas, speech and images. Queer identities are then seen as riding the crest of a wave of sexual revolution that has been washing over India over the past two decades.</p>
<p>These two formations, the Internet and the queer (we have not yet established what kind of formations they are), have been brought together in the term ‘cyber queer’ for the purpose of sociological and other analyses. The Levi’s ad for ‘innerwear’ shows a young black man saying, “On my web profile, I am a girl”. You can be a beer-bellied man in real life and turn into a voluptuous woman in second life. The virtual life, the virtual body and the virtual sex – the Internet is often spoken of as performing two functions for someone practicing alternative sexualities:</p>
<p>that it lets them be ‘other’ than they are (or are forced to be in real life);</p>
<p>by doing this, they are allowed to express their ‘real’ sexual desire or gender in a ‘safer’ space than in real life, thereby allowing for a freeing up or an opening (however, secretively it is done). “Cruising in physical spaces of the city has always been an affair which dangles on the edge of unsafety. Arrests and blackmail by policemen loaded with section 377, or extortion for money are often reported within queer circles. The <a class="external-link" href="http://www.gaybombay.org/">Gay Bombay</a> website has several articles and personal narratives which function as cruising guidelines and warnings. has several articles and personal narratives which function as cruising guidelines and warnings. In this context, Internet portals like <a class="external-link" href="http://www.robtex.com/dns/guys4men.com.html">guys4men</a> provide forums which can be used to manoeuvre cruising in a different manner, possibly much safer than in moonlit Nehru or Central Parks in Delhi or train-station loos in Bombay.” (Mario d’Penha, gay activist [7])</p>
<p>Again, the notion of ‘space’ as suddenly emerging from the shadowy realms of ambiguity and secrecy, to stand in for freedom, is something that one often encounters in relation to cyber-queerness. And it is not just physical space which is pulled into this discourse of the technological shift, it is desire itself - “Desire is unabashed, playful and complex here”[8]. Desire, personified thus, is then seen as something set free by and through technological innovation.</p>
<p>Though this notion of sudden freedom is contested by researchers and scholars within the field, the result of that contestation has often been to:</p>
<ul>
<li>affirm, in place of a single figure of the liberated cyber queer, the multiplicity of behaviours, dangers and freedoms that are generated. This is a little like affirming, in place of a single body called <em>the public</em>, several bodies that are termed multiple publics, or subaltern publics. The problem with this approach is that the nature of this public, the public-ness of it, is not then fully interrogated. It is assumed that the multiplicity in itself will be contest enough;</li>
<li>return to the body as existing at the root of queer existence. This return then, in claiming something that has been forgotten, or disavowed (our bodily existence), finds a strange comfort in this body, settling within it as if having found a location from which to speak, about the virtual, about cyberspace. For example, though Jodi O’Brien, in her essay “Changing the Subject”[9] refutes the claim “There are no closets in cyberspace”, she finds it necessary to return to the ‘body’ and not to subjectivity in order to do so – it is as if the materiality of the body is the only <em>concrete</em> thing that will allow this contestation. “The ‘alternative’ experiences that are enacted in ‘alternative’ or queer spaces are based on realities of the flesh: real, embodied experiences and/or fantasies cultivated through exposure to multisensory stimuli.” The body then becomes the explanatory fulcrum, and it is only from here that any kind of relationship to what is seen as virtuality can be understood.</li>
</ul>
<p>An ancestor to the above problem - “What precisely does the <em>cyber</em> add to the <em>queer</em> identity which it lacked previously?”[10] This question, framed as the most basic one can ask of this figure, makes the following assumptions – that ‘queer’ is a human subject that precedes ‘cyber’, a.k.a non-human technology that the latter <em>adds</em> to this human subject and how it performs in the world, or has transformed it <em>after the fact</em>.</p>
<p>It is remarkably easy to say that in the great saga of sexual practices, technology has been an agent of transformation. Or, more importantly, to place cyberspace and queerness on par with each other, as sharing the same nature, or functioning on the same fundamental principle – of decentering or destabilizing a previously integrated or unified subject. Nina Wakeford asks of the term cyberqueer, “…what is the purpose of creating a hybrid of the two? It is a calculated move which stresses the interdependence of the two concepts, both in the daily practices of the certain and maintenance of a cyberspace which is lesbian, gay, transgendered or queer, and in the research of these arenas.”[11] By this logic, they are interdependent because there is some inherent quality in each that makes it offer itself to the other. “Queer sex is about following the desires of the flesh into an unnamed, uncategorized, uncharted realm, and doing something that neither of you can 'code'.”[12] The value of queerness therefore, derives from this lack of naming, an escape from coding of a particular kind, the zone of ambiguous enactments of desire.[13] “While it is this open transparent character of online existence that lays the Internet vulnerable to surveillance, it is also its self-inscribing character that makes it the playground of possibilities it is at its best. Cyberspace is habitat, playground, university, boulevard and refuge” (Shuddhabrata Sengupta, ‘Net Nomad on a Rough Route: A Despatch from Cyberspace’[14]). It is a zone of enactments of desire, a playground of possibilities, undefined, unbound.</p>
<p>There is then a reading of technology and sexuality as feeding off each other - “The relationship between technology and sexuality is a symbiotic one. As humankind creates new inventions, people find ways of eroticizing new technology. So it is not surprising that with the advent of the information superhighway, more and more folks are discovering the sexual underground within the virtual community in cyberspace” (Daniel Tsang)[15]. The above quote assumes the following:</p>
<ul>
<li>that humankind existed before technology;</li>
<li>that first a technology is born and then there is the eroticization of this technology. It is only because of these assumptions that technology (in this case the Internet) as such can be seen as fundamentally open. Latour’s critique of the first assumption is that “Without technological detours, the properly human cannot exist.”</li>
</ul>
<p>At the point of encountering this strange euphoria, we need to pause and consider, with Latour, this very relationship between technology and sexuality. “There has been a persistent silence on matters of sexuality in critical cultural studies of technology, perhaps partially because technology was associated with the instrumental to the exclusion of the representational (Case 1995). The creation of the term ‘cyber queer’ is itself an act of resistance in the face of such suppression” (Nina Wakeford). If the relationship between the two is viewed along representational lines, then the only direction that can be taken is one which will posit the human before the technological, will posit technological as that which enables (or not) representations of this human subject. In this sense, the representational is not far from the instrumental as an explanatory framework.</p>
<p>In all the explanations we have seen above, at one level or another, technology has viewed as the ‘thing’[17], and morality as that which ascribes meaning in a particular way to this thing. For example, the mobile phone is seen as the thing, the technology, with concrete attributes and use value. Morality is what then prescribes how this thing is to be used or not used, or the dangers that follow from its use in the world of social relations. Latour argues against this way of positioning technology and morality, and instead calls them both modes of ‘alterity’, albeit two different modes. Alterity in his definition is being-as-another, technology and morality both then constituting a particular way of <em>being-as-another</em>. Technology is not what you use, it is not a means to an end, it in fact changes the end to which it is the means. It is the curve, the detour. Morality is what questions means and ends and prevents the easy categorization of objects or people as one or another.</p>
<p>We are used to thinking of morality as keeping things static, wanting them unchanged, preventing new ideas or practices from being absorbed into the domains of our existence. Especially when it comes to sexuality, morality is seen as that which blocks, which lives in the past, which ‘ossifies’ – “…morality consists precisely of the willingness/ability to accept and organize one's behaviour in accordance with… ‘ossified’ recipes for interaction. If gender is a primary (read: coded as ‘natural’) institution for organizing social interaction, then boundary transgressions are not only likely to arouse confusion but to elicit moral outrage from the boundary keepers.”[18] Morality here refers to boundary keeping. Latour shifts our understanding of morality in ways that allow us to read beyond the boundary keeping. According to him, morality constantly interrupts the means-to-end process by questioning the use of something/someone as a means towards an end. Morality is then a hindrance to this process, not an ossification of social relations or practices.</p>
<p>This argument disrupts the location of technology as that which signals an opening out of the universe, and morality as signalling a closing off. True, Latour himself reads technology as creating <em>new</em> functions, or as creating <em>new</em> ends but he does not categorise these and the technologies they derive from as ‘open’. For him, technology is opaque, unreadable. Sexuality also then cannot be read as feeding off of technology, as some kind of symbiotic twin to it. The relationship between technological shifts and sexual practices or identities has to be read alternately to this idea of freedom from the shackles of social relations and bodily constraints. Sexuality cannot also then be opposed to morality, as it has often been done.</p>
<p> </p>
<p class="discreet">[1] <a class="external-link" href="http://www.openinternetcoalition.org/">www.openinternetcoalition.org.</a></p>
<p class="discreet">[2] Jarvis, Jeff. “Openness and the Internet”, <a class="external-link" href="http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/may2009/ca2009058_754247.htm">http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/may2009/ca2009058_754247.htm.</a></p>
<p class="discreet">[3] Doval, Nikita. “Bold Bodies”, in The Week, September 7, 2008.</p>
<p class="discreet">[4] Ibid.</p>
<p class="discreet">[5] Quoted in Doval, Nikita. "Bold Bodies", in The Week, September 7, 2008, p 50.</p>
<p class="discreet">[6] <a class="external-link" href="http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?227507">http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?227507</a></p>
<p class="discreet">[7] Quoted in Katyal, Akhil. “Cyber Cultures/Queer Cultures in Delhi”. See <a class="external-link" href="http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/2007-July/002827.html">http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/2007-July/002827.html</a></p>
<p class="discreet">[8] Katyal, Akhil “Cyber Cultures/Queer Cultures in Delhi”. See <a class="external-link" href="http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/2007-July/002827.html">http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/2007-July/002827.html</a></p>
<p class="discreet">[9] Women and Performance: Issue 17: Sexuality and Cyberspace.</p>
<p class="discreet">[10] Wakeford, Nina. “Cyberqueer”, in Bell, David and Barbara Kennedy, eds. The Cybercultures Reader. Routledge: London, 2000</p>
<p class="discreet">[11] “Cyberqueer”, in Bell, David and Barbara Kennedy, eds. The Cybercultures Reader.</p>
<p class="discreet">[12] O’Brien, Jodi. “Changing the Subject”. In Women and Performance, Issue 17: Sexuality and Cyberspace.</p>
<p class="discreet">[13] Here I deal with the idea of queerness at an almost commonsensical level, not at the level of the queer theory of Judith Butler or Eve Sedgwick, just as cyberspace is also dealt with at the level of what it seems to be seen as doing.</p>
<p class="discreet">[14] Quoted in the Sarai discussion.</p>
<p class="discreet">[15] Tsang, Daniel. “Notes on Queer ‘n’ Asian Virtual Sex”. In Bell, David and Barbara Kennedy, eds. The Cybercultures Reader. Routledge: London, 2000.</p>
<p class="discreet">[16] Latour, Bruno. “Morality and Technology: The End of the Means”. See <a class="external-link" href="http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/080-en.html">http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/080-en.html</a>.</p>
<p class="discreet">[17] I put this in quotes because latour has a very specific definition of ‘thing’ or Ding, which this is not.</p>
<p class="discreet">[18] O’Brien, Jodi. “Changing the Subject”, in Women and Performance, Issue 17: Sexuality and Cyberspace. See <a class="external-link" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040604123458/www.echonyc.com/~women/Issue17/art-browning.html">http://web.archive.org/web/20040604123458/www.echonyc.com/~women/Issue17/art-browning.html</a></p>
<p class="discreet">[18] O’Brien, Jodi. “Changing the Subject”, in Women and Performance, Issue 17: Sexuality and Cyberspace. See <a class="external-link" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040604123458/www.echonyc.com/~women/Issue17/art-browning.html">http://web.archive.org/web/20040604123458/www.echonyc.com/~women/Issue17/art-browning.html</a></p>
<p class="discreet"> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/queer-histories-of-the-internet/symbiotic-twins'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/queer-histories-of-the-internet/symbiotic-twins</a>
</p>
No publisherNitya Vhistories of internet in IndiaCybercultures2019-09-18T14:10:06ZBlog EntryReflecting from the Beyond
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/reflecting-from-the-beyond
<b>After going ‘beyond the digital’ with Blank Noise through the last nine posts, the final post in the series reflects on the understanding gained so far about youth digital activism and questions one needs to carry in moving forward on researching, working with, and understanding digital natives. </b>
<p></p>
<p class="Normalfirstparagraph">Throughout
the series, I have argued the following points. <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/beyond-the-digital-understanding-digital-natives-with-a-cause" class="external-link">Firstly</a>, the 21<sup>st</sup>
century society is changing into a network society and that youth movements are
changing accordingly. I have outlined the gaps in the current perspectives used
in understanding the current form and proposed to approach the topic by going
beyond the digital: from a youth standpoint, exploring all the elements of
social movement, and based on a case study in the Global South – the uber cool
Blank Noise community who have embraced the research with open arms. The
methodology has allowed me to identify the newness in <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/talking-back-without-talking-back" class="external-link">youth’s approach to
social change</a> and <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/the-many-faces-within" class="external-link">ways of organizing</a>. Although I do not mean to generalize,
there are some points where the case study resonates with the broader youth
movement of today. In this concluding post, I will reflect on how the research
journey has led me to rethink several points about youth, social change, and
activism.</p>
<p>While
social movements are commonly imagined to aim for concrete structural change,
many youth movements today aim for social and cultural change at the intangible
attitudinal level. Consequently, they articulate the issue with an intangible
opponent (the mindset) and less-measurable goals. Their objective is to raise
public awareness, but their approach to social change is through creating
personal change at the individual level through engagement with the movement.
Hence, ‘success’ is materialized in having as many people as possible involved
in the movement. This is enabled by several factors.</p>
<p>The
first is the Internet and new media/social technologies, which is used as a
site for community building, support group, campaigns, and a basis to allow
people spread all over the globe to remain involved in the collective in the
absence of a physical office. However, the cyber is not just a tool; it is also
a public space that is equally important with the physical space. Despite acknowledging
the diversity of the public engaged in these spaces, youth today do not
completely regard them as two separate spheres. Engaging in virtual community
has a real impact on everyday lives; the virtual is a part of real life for
many youth (Shirky, 2010). However, it is not a smooth ‘space of flows’
(Castells, 2009) either. Youth actors in the Global South do recognize that
their ease in navigating both spheres is the ability of the elite in their
societies, where the digital divide is paramount. The disconnect stems from
their <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/the-class-question" class="external-link">acknowledgement</a> that social change must be multi-class and an expression
of their reflexivity in facing the challenge.</p>
<p>The
second enabling factor is its highly individualized approach. The movement
enables people to personalize their involvement, both in terms of frequency and
ways of engagement as well as in meaning-making. It is an echo of the age of
individualism that youth are growing up in, shaped by the liberal economic and
political ideologies in the 1990s India
and elsewhere (France,
2007). Individualism has become a new social structure, in which personal decisions
and meaning-making is deemed as the key to solve structural issues in late
modernity (<em>Ibid).</em></p>
<p>In this era, young
people’s lives consist of a combination of a range of activities rather than
being focused only in one particular activity (<em>Ibid). </em>This is also the case in their social and political
engagement. Very few young people worldwide are full-time activists or
completely apathetic, the mainstream are actually involved in ‘everyday
activism’ (Bang, 2004; Harris et al, 2010). These are young people who are
personalizing politics by adopting causes in their daily behaviour and
lifestyle, for instance by purchasing only Fair Trade goods, or being very involved
in a short term concrete project but then stopping and moving on to other activities.
The emergence of these everyday activists are explained by the dwindling authority
of the state in the emergence of major corporations as political powers
(Castells, 2009) and youth’s decreased faith in formal political structures
which also resulted in decreased interest in collectivist, hierarchical social
movements in favour of a more individualized form of activism made easier with
Web 2.0 (Harris et al, 2010).</p>
<p>A collective of
everyday activists means that there are many forms of participation that one
can fluidly navigate in, but it requires a committed leadership core recognized
through presence and engagement. As Clay Shirky (2010: 90) said, the main
cultural and ethical norm in these groups is to ‘give credit where credit is
due’. Since these youth are used to producing and sharing content rather than
only consuming, the aforementioned success of the movement lies on the leaders’
ability to facilitate this process. The power to direct the movement is not
centralized in the leaders; it is dispersed to members who want to use the
opportunity.</p>
<p>This form of
movement defies the way social movements have been theorized before, where
individuals commit to a tangible goal and the group engagement directed under a
defined leadership. The contemporary youth movement could only exist by staying
with the intangible articulation and goal to accommodate the variety of
personalized meaning-making and allow both personal satisfaction and still
create a wider impact; it will be severely challenged by a concrete goal like
advocating for a specific regulation. Not all youth there are ‘activist’ in the
common full-time sense, for most everyday activists their engagement might not
be a form of activism at all but a productive and pleasurable way to use their
free time<span class="MsoFootnoteReference">
</span> - or, in Clay Shirky’s term, cognitive surplus
(2010).</p>
<p>Revisiting my
initial intent to put the term activism under scrutiny, I acknowledge this as a
call for scholars to re-examine the concepts of activism and social movements
through a process of de-framing and re-framing to deal with how youth today are
shaping the form of movements. Although the limitations of this paper do not
allow me to directly address the challenge, I offer my own learning from this
process for the quest of future researchers.</p>
<p>The way young
people today are reimagining social change and movements reiterate that
political and social engagement should be conceived in the plural. Instead of
“Activism” there should be “activisms” in various forms; there is not a new
form replacing the older, but all co-existing and having the potential to
complement each other. Allowing people to cope with street sexual harassment
and create a buzz around the issue should complement, not replace, efforts made
by established movements to propose a legislation or service provision from the
state. This is also a response I offer to the proponents of the aforementioned
“doubt” narrative.</p>
<p>I share the more
optimistic viewpoint about how these new forms are presenting more avenues to
engage the usually apathetic youth into taking action for a social cause.
However, I also acknowledge that the tools that have facilitated the emergence
of this new form of movement have existed for less than a decade; thus, we
still have to see how it evolves through the years.</p>
<p>Hence, I also find
the following questions to be relevant for proponents of the “hope” narrative.
Social change needs to cater to the most marginalized in the society, but as
elaborated before, the methods of engagement both on the physical and virtual
spaces are still contextual to the middle class. Therefore, how can the
emerging youth movements evolve to reach other groups in the society? Since
most of these movements are divorced from existing movements, how can they
synergize with existing movements to propel concrete change? These are open questions
that perhaps will be answered with time, but my experience with Blank Noise has
shown that these actors have the reflexivity required to start exploring
solutions to the challenges.</p>
<p>The research
started from a long-term personal interest and curiosity. In this journey, I
have found some answers but ended up with more questions that will also stay
with me in the long term. As a parting note before, I would like to share a
quote that will accompany my ongoing reflection on these questions.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><em>My advice to
other young activists of the world: study and respect history... but ultimately
break the mould. There have never been social media tools like this before. We
are the first generation to test them out: to make the mistakes but also the
breakthrough.</em></p>
<p align="right" style="text-align: right;">(Tammy
Tibbetts, 2010)</p>
<p class="Heading1notchapter"> </p>
<p><em>This is the </em><strong><em>tenth and final</em></strong><em> post in the <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/the-beyond-the-digital-directory" class="external-link"><strong>Beyond
the Digital </strong>series,</a> a research project that aims to explore
new insights to understand youth digital activism conducted by Maesy Angelina
with Blank Noise under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge Programme.</em></p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p><em>References:</em></p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p>Bang, H.P. (2004) ‘Among everyday makers and expert citizens’. Accessed
21 September 2010. <a href="http://www.sam.kau.se/stv/ksspa/papers/bang.pdf">http://www.sam.kau.se/stv/ksspa/papers/bang.pdf</a></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Castells, M. (2009) <em>Communication
Power. </em>New York: Oxford University
Press.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>France, A. (2007) <em>Understanding Youth in Late Modernity</em>. Berkshire:
Open University Press.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Harris, A., Wyn, J., and Younes, S. (2010) ‘Beyond apathetic or
activist youth: ‘Ordinary’ young people and contemporary forms of
participaton’, <em>Young </em>Vol. 18:9, pp.
9-32</p>
<p>Shirky, C. (2010) <em>Cognitive Surplus:
Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. </em>London: Penguin Press</p>
<p> </p>
<p><em>Image source:</em></p>
<p><a href="http://blog.blanknoise.org/2009/08/street-signs.html">http://blog.blanknoise.org/2009/08/street-signs.html</a></p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/reflecting-from-the-beyond'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/reflecting-from-the-beyond</a>
</p>
No publishermaesyCyberspaceDigital ActivismDigital NativesStreet sexual harassmentBlank Noise ProjectCyberculturesBeyond the DigitalYouthResearchers at Work2015-05-14T12:21:29ZBlog EntryReconceptualizing Privacy on Social Network(s) Sites
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/reconceptualizing-privacy-on-social-network-s-sites
<b>While “privacy” on social network sites remains a highly ambiguous notion, much debate surrounding the issue to date has focused on privacy as the nonpublic-ness of personal information. However, as these social platforms become sites for diverse forms of “networking”, privacy must also be popularly conceptualized as control over personal data flows. </b>
<p></p>
<p><strong><br /></strong>The perils of information exposure and the loss of privacy
on social network sites (SNS) has become a talked about issue. Information once
considered has private has in many instances become viewable by unintended
audiences of parents, colleagues, college admission officers, employers, even the courts. The recent Facebook
<a href="http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/facebooks-new-privacy-changes-good-bad-and-ugly">privacy
scandal</a>, which left sensitive personal information for millions of users
open and searchable via Google, heightened privacy
consciousness amongst users, public interest groups, and Facebook itself<a name="_ftnref1" href="#_ftn1"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></a>. As the free flowing nature of information on the
internet has redefined practices surrounding the disclosure of information, new and multidimensional privacy challenges have arose as a result. </p>
<p>The much-celebrated ethos of “openness” continues to attract
numerous and diverse users to SNS, and without a doubt, these platforms have
enabled users to stay connected and share information with the people around
them -- for better or worse. However, it is within this inherently open context
that notions of privacy are continuously being challenged and redefined. While a particular user may prefer to keep
certain information widely available to attract “potential friends” within a
certain network or social circle, it may go without saying that the same user
may not be comfortable with a family member viewing that same information, or
having personal information <a href="http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=114232425072">open access
to third parties</a>. It is this iterative
tension between “openness” and privacy which beckons the need to balance the
openness of SNS with the privacy of its members.</p>
<p><strong>Privacy as a
Semi-Public Personal Space</strong></p>
<p>Most commonly, privacy has been interpreted by users as a
“lack of access”, or the degree to which they are able to protect their
information from the public gaze. Various
research examining the privacy (mal)practices of users have also, by in large,
conceptualized privacy within this public/private binary. The most popular SNS today do allow users to
careful define their privacy level.
However, whether or not the information of a user remains open, restricted,
or private will depend on the privacy preferences unique to the user, and to
some degree, the architecture of a particular SNS. Inferring from privacy in practice,
researchers have generally labeled users as privacy fundamentalists, pragmatics,
or the marginally concerned <a name="_ftnref3" href="#_ftn3"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></a>. While making
this distinction has been useful, is important to note that the diversity and
complexity of relationships within a single networked space obscures the
inherent simplicity of such typology.
With many online social networks becoming representative of offline
affiliation<a name="_ftnref4" href="#_ftn4"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></a>,
the challenges inherent to maintaining a diverse number of social relations online may lead researchers to interpret uncertain privacy practices as paradoxical<a name="_ftnref5" href="#_ftn5"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></a>. Such a notion also calls into question the
utility of categorizing users according to their privacy practices.</p>
<p>To illustrate such complexity, many users today are
compelled to join sub-networks or groups within these sites, which then cluster
users and relax the privacy settings between them. While a college student may wish to keep
weekend outings hidden from the professors they have connected with, they may
also be tempted to reveal such information with his network of peers-- to which
the professors may belong. The open nature of these sub-networks are
inherently valuable for maintaining offline affiliations, friendships and collegial relationship. However, this also increases the likelihood invisible audiences of unintended users may gain access to potentially
unflattering information to an . By joining a network on Facebook, for example,
the personal information of a users profile page becomes open to all “friends
and networks”, even if the users may previously had their information set
behind a more granular privacy settings. </p>
<p>Within these open spaces, the ability of users to make
appropriate or selective disclosures of information is becoming obscured. While Facebook does allow for users to alter
the settings after joining a network, such “openness by default” may catch many
users off guard or only be brought to their attention once they face its
negative repercussions. Because the maintenance of a wide variety of
such social relationships depends on the disclosure/non-disclosure of certain
types of information<a name="_ftnref6" href="#_ftn6"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></a>,
privacy in praxis has become an act of balancing the utility of social network
with the privacy concerns they present. Users are now faced with the challenge
of classifying certain pieces of information public or non public, or
determining suitable practices of disclosures amongst a diverse social graph. It
is not to be expected that such decisions will become easier within a context
whose architecture is built on openness to make it “easier for friends to find, identify, and learn about you”. </p>
<p><strong>Privacy as Control
over the Flow of Information</strong></p>
<p>While the classification and coding of information vis-à-vis
a diverse set of relationships forms the base of practice for most of the
privacy conscious, this paradigm of privacy remains rather limited within a
defined network of individuals, whether they be “friends”, within an intended
audience, or not. Within this framework, information is understood as being either socially or
institutionally sensitive, <a name="_ftnref7" href="#_ftn7"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></a>as its exposure may affect certain social or institutional relationships. Given the spatial and temporal context the
“social profile” gives to personal information, it is reasonable to see how
popular understandings of privacy have been within the public/private paradigm.</p>
<p>While this may be the case, it is important that users
observe how the inherently “networked” nature of these spaces complicates the
common privacy paradigm. When a user
joins a SNS, they enter into a complex and opaque set of networked relationships
beyond those with their “friends” and “friends of friends”. There exists sub-networks of third-party
actors which constitute corporate entities, their partners and
affiliates --may they be advertisers, third party developers, or a broad range
of other service providers. Many of
which are granted access to your information in varying forms and for differing
reasons. With the introduction of the Open Social
network, fronted by Google and various social advertising and developers
networks, the ability for one to maintain the control and integrity of their
information or “data” has become an increasingly complex endeavor. </p>
<p>While the importance of maintaining non-public social spaces
online should not be diminished, in a time when collecting, storing,
aggregating and disseminating information has become increasingly easy and
cost-effective, users of SNS must begin to conceptualize online privacy in a
way which extends past the social context popularly understood to give
“information” meaning. Once information
loses its contextual place of meaning, which may be the profile itself, users<a name="_ftnref8" href="#_ftn8"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></a>
seem less apt to consciously consider the collection and dissemination of such
data as a breach of privacy, or even a concern at all. It may be true that the socially sensitive
nature of such data is reduced once it is disassociated with a particular user,
or that the click stream patterns and other information collected by
advertisers through cookies may not always pose a direct and potential threat
to our privacy as we’ve thus far conceived it.
However, a brief glance at the privacy policies, terms of use, and
on-site practices of a few SNS illuminates that privacy must be seen as
the control over the flows of personal information.that</p>
<p><strong>Privacy vis-à-vis
Third Parties</strong></p>
<p>As many have illuminated, SNS are commercial enterprises
with a business model based on the harvesting of personal information for
marketing and other purposes<a name="_ftnref9" href="#_ftn9"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></a>. Therefore, it may be naive for a users to
believe what happens on these sites stays on these sites, or that privacy
settings, however granular they may be, grants them adequate control over their
information. While SNS such as Bebo
state that they “take your privacy very seriously”, the onus is on the user to
determine whether or not the privacy standards of third party applications are
up to par. The transfer of
responsibility for monitoring the privacy practices of third parties is
characteristic of many popular SNS.
MySpace states in their privacy policy that they do not “control third
parties” and cannot “dictate their actions”, while Facebook similarly states
that they cannot guarantee that such third parties will “follow their
rules”. </p>
<p>As third parties are often governed by their own privacy
policies, the unmonitored and unenforced <a name="_ftnref10" href="#_ftn10"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></a>nature of these networked relationships places further responsibility<a id="_anchor_2" class="msocomanchor" name="_msoanchor_2" href="#_msocom_2"> </a>on the individual users to ensure that privacy practices
are adequate. This becomes quite
difficult on SNS like Facebook, where third party developers are granted access
to the personal information of all you and all your network
members, including photos, videos, and other biographical information<a name="_ftnref11" href="#_ftn11"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></a>.</p>
<p>The relatively anonymous nature of
these parallel sub-networks also obscures the ability of the user to take
control over the accessibility of their information. Further, the privacy policies of the various
SNS give no indication as to “who” their affiliates, partners, and service
providers are. Most SNS also reserve the
right to transfer personally identifiable information to its partners and
affiliates if they have a “business reason to do so” and in all cases,
advertisers are subject to their own privacy policies with regards to the
information they collect -- some of it personally identifiable. To complicate matters, all of the leading
SNS, including Facebook, Orkut, Myspace, and Bebo, reserve the right to collect
information about you from other companies and publicly available sources. It is unclear as to what information is being
collected or for what purposes, and unfortunately, such information is effectively
kept “private”.</p>
<p><strong>Redefining
Privacy on Social Network Sites</strong></p>
<p>Social network sites can be seen as open spaces which allow
users to maintain diverse personal relationships. However, the somewhat anonymous parallel
networks of third parties which exist on these sites threatens the “open
nature” of these sites vis-à-vis our privacy.
While users may maintain that the information they have provided is kept
secure and private, these parallel third party networks negates the control an
individual may assert over the flow of their information. It is within this context that privacy needs
to be conceptually redefined in relation to<a id="_anchor_3" class="msocomanchor" name="_msoanchor_3" href="#_msocom_3"></a> both user “information” as it appears on a social
profile, and “data” once it is processed by third parties. There is a need for an alternative paradigm
to privacy on SNS which takes into consideration the flow, retention and use of
personal information. </p>
<p>While it may be too early to determine whether or not the expected
digital dossiers complete with complex user-specific biographical data
will be developed or come to threaten our privacy in a fundamentally new way,
it is also premature and erroneous to assume that traditional notions of
privacy are fundamentally antithetical to the net<a name="_ftnref12" href="#_ftn12"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"></span></span></a>. As communication become increasingly mediated
by digital technologies, so to should our perceptions of privacy and ways of
preserving it. SNS must also become
responsible for ensuring greater transparency in the flows and uses of personal
information, working to standardize the privacy policies in such a way that
makes the user experience one which is seamless with respect to privacy
practices. Initiatives such as the W3C’s
P3P are a promising step towards nurturing a more nuanced understanding of
privacy among internet users. Only through
understanding privacy as the control over the flows of personal information can
be balance the interests of SNS users with the business models of these “open”
networked spaces.</p>
<div>
<p align="center" style="text-align: center;">Top of Form</p>
</div>
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</div>
<div>
<div>
<div id="_com_3" class="msocomtxt">
<p> </p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/reconceptualizing-privacy-on-social-network-s-sites'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/reconceptualizing-privacy-on-social-network-s-sites</a>
</p>
No publisherrebeccaCybercultures2011-08-18T05:07:09ZBlog EntryRe:wiring Bodies - Dr. Asha Achuthan
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/rewiringdoc
<b>First draft of the monograph on "Rewiring Bodies" by Dr. Asha Achutan; format for Microsoft Office users</b>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/rewiringdoc'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/rewiringdoc</a>
</p>
No publishernishantPublished under a Creative Commons LicenseCyborgsCyberculturesArchivesDigital subjectivitiesResourcesHistory2011-09-21T07:23:44ZFilePolitical is as Political does
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/political
<b>The Talking Back workshop has been an extraordinary experience for me. The questions that I posed for others attending the workshop have hounded me as they went through the course of discussion, analysis and dissection. Strange nuances have emerged, certain presumptions have been questioned, new legacies have been discovered, novel ideas are still playing ping-pong in my mind, and a strange restless excitement – the kind that keeps me awake till dawning morn – has taken over me, as I try and figure out the wherefore and howfore of things. I began the research project on Digital Natives in a condition of not knowing, almost two years ago. Since then, I have taken many detours, rambled on strange paths, discovered unknown territories and reached a mile-stone where I still don’t know, but don’t know what I don’t know, and that is a good beginning.</b>
<p> <strong>The researcher in his heaven, all well with the world</strong></p>
<p> This first workshop is not merely a training lab. For me, it was the
extension of the research inquiry, and collaboratively producing some
frames of reference, some conditions of knowing, and some ways of
thinking about this strange, ambiguous and ambivalent category of
Digital Natives. The people who have assembled at this workshop have
identified themselves as Digital Natives as a response to the open call.
They all have practices which are startlingly unique and simultaneously
surprisingly similar. Despite the great dissonance in their
geo-political contexts and socio-cultural orientations, they seem to be
bound together by things beyond the technological.</p>
<p> Each one chose a definition for him/herself that straddles so many
different ideas of how technologies interact with us; there are writers
who offer a subjective position and affective relation to technologies
and the world around them; there are artists who seek to change the
world, one barcode at a time; there are optimist warriors who have waged
battles against injustice and discrimination in the worlds they occupy;
there are explorers who have made meaning out of socio-cultural
terrains that they live in; there are leaders who have mobilized
communities; there are adventurers who have taken on responsibilities
way beyond their young years; there are researchers who have sought
higher grounds and epistemes in the quest of knowledge. The varied
practice is further informed by their own positions as well as their
relationship with the different realities they engage with.</p>
<p> How, then, does one make sense of this babble of diversity? How does
one even begin to articulate a collective identity for people who are
so unique that sometimes they are the only ones in their contexts to
initiate these interventions? Where do I find a legacy or a context that
makes sense of these diversities without conflating or coercing their
uniqueness? This is not an easy task for a researcher, and I have
struggled over the two days to figure out a way in which I can start
develop a knowledge framework through which I can not only bring
coherence to this group but also do it without imposing my questions,
suggestions or agendas on you. And it is only now, at a quarter to dawn,
as I think and interact more with the different digital natives that
things get shapes for me – shapes that are not yet clear, probably
obscured by the blurriness of sleep and the rushed time that we have
been living in the last few days – and I now attempt to trace the
contours if not the details of these shapes.</p>
<p> <strong>Questioning the Question</strong></p>
<p> The first insight for me came from the fact that the Digital Natives
in the workshop talked back – not only to the structures that their
practice engages with, but also the questions that I posed to them.
“What does it mean to be Political?” I has asked on the first day,
knowing well that this wasn’t going to be an easy dialogue. Even after
years of thinking about the Political as necessarily the Personal (and
vice versa), it still is sometimes difficult to actually articulate the
process or the imagination of the Political. It is no wonder that so
many people take the easy recourse of talking about governments,
judiciaries, democracies and the related paraphernalia to talk about
Politics.</p>
<p> I knew, even before I posed the question, that this was going to
lead to confusion, to conditions of being lost, to processes of
destabilising comfort zones. However, what I was not ready for was a
schizophrenic moment of epiphany where I tried to ask myself what I
understood as the Political. And as I tried to explain it to myself, to
explain it to others, to push my own knowledge of it, to understand
others’ ideas and imaginations, I came up with a formulation which goes
beyond my own earlier knowledges. There are five different articulations
of the legacies and processes of the Political that I take with me from
the discussions (some were suggested by other people, some are my
flights of fancy based on our conversations), and it is time to reflect
on them:</p>
<p> <em><strong>Political as dialogue</strong></em></p>
<p> This was perhaps, the easiest to digest because it sounds like a
familiar formulation. To be political is to be in a condition of
dialogue. Which means that Talking Back was suddenly not about Talking
Against or Being Talked To. It was about Talking With. It was a
conversation. Sometimes with strangers. Sometimes with people made
familiar with time. Sometimes with people who we know but have not
realised we know. Sometimes with the self. The power of names, the
strength of being in a conversation – to talk and also to listen is a
condition of the Political. In dialogue (as opposed to a babble) is the
genesis of being political. Because when we enter a dialogue, we are no
longer just us. We are able to detach ourselves from US and offer a
point of engagement to the person who was, till now, only outside of us.</p>
<p> <em><strong>Political as concern</strong></em></p>
<p> This particular idea of the political as being concerned was a
surprise to me. I have, through discourses and practice within gender
and sexuality fields, understood affective relationships as sustaining
political concerns and subjectivities. However, I had overlooked the
fact that the very act of being concerned, what a young digital native
called ‘being burned’ about something that we notice in our immediate
(or extended) environments is already a political subjectivity
formation. To be concerned, to develop an empathetic link to the
problems that we identify, is a political act. It doesn’t always have to
take on the mantle of public action or intervention. Sometimes, just to
care enough, is enough.</p>
<p> <em><strong>Political as change</strong></em></p>
<p> This is a debate that needs more conversations for me. Politics,
Knowledge, Change, Transformation – these are the four keywords (further
complicated by self-society binaries) that have strange permutations
and combination. To Know is to be political because it produces a
subjectivity that has now found a new way of thinking about itself and
how it relates to the external reality. This act of Knowing, thus
produces a change in our self. However, this change is not always a
change that leads to transformation. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake can
often be indulgent. Even when the knowledge produces a significant and
dramatic change, often this change is restricted to the self.</p>
<p> When does this knowing self, which is in a condition of change,
become a catalyst for transformation? When does this knowing-changing
translate into a transformation for the world outside of us? Just to be
in a condition of knowing does not grant the agency required for the
social transformation that we are trying to understand. Where does this
agency come from? How do we understand the genesis and dissemination of
this agency? And what are the processes of change that embody and foster
the Political?</p>
<p> <em><strong>Political as Freedom</strong></em></p>
<p> On the first thought, the imagination of Political as Freedom seemed
to obvious; commonsense and perhaps commonplace. However, I decided put
the two in an epistemological dialogue and realised that there are many
prismatic relationships I had not talked about before I was privy to
these conversations. Here is a non-exhaustive list: Political Freedom,
Politics of Freedom, Free to be Political, Political as Freedom, Freedom
as Political... is it possible to be political without the quest of
freedom? Is the freedom we achieve, at the expense of somebody else’s
Political stance? How does the business of being Political come to be?
Not Why? But How? If Digital Natives are changing the state of being
political what are they replacing? What are they inventing? Where, in
all these possibilities lies Freedom?</p>
<p> <a href="http://northeastwestsouth.net/brief-treatise-despair-meaning-or-pointlessness-everything#comment-2131"><em><strong>Political as Reticence</strong></em></a></p>
<p> We all talked about voice – whose, where, for whom, etc. It was a
given that to give voice, to have voice, to speak, to talk, to talk back
were conditions of political dialogue and subversion, of intervention
and exchange. So many of us – participants or facilitators – talked
about how to speak, what technologies of speech, how to build conditions
of interaction... and then, like the noise in an otherwise seamless
fabric of empowerment came the idea of reticence. Is it possible to be
silent and still be political? If I do not speak, is it always only
because I cannot? What about my agency to choose not to speak? As
technologies – of governance, of self, and of the social constantly
force us to produce data and information, through ledgers and censuses
and identification cards – make speech a normative way of engagement,
isn’t the right of Refusal to Speak, political?</p>
<p> Sometimes, it is necessary to exercise silence as a tool or a weapon
of political resistance. The non-speaking subject holds back and
refuses to succumb to pressures and expectations of a dominant
erstwhile, and in his/her silence, produces such a cacophony of meaning
that it asks questions that the loudest voices would not have managed to
ask.</p>
<p> <strong>The Beginning of a Start; Perhaps also the other way round</strong></p>
<p> These are my first reflections on the conversations we have had over
the two days. I feel excited, inspired, moved and exhilarated as I
carry myself on these flights of ideation, thought and
conceptualisation. It is important for me that these are questions that I
did not think of in a vacuum but in conversation and dialogue with this
varied pool of people who have spent so much of their time and effort
to not only make their work intelligible but also to reflect on the
processes by which we paint ourselves political. I have learned to
sharpen questions of the political that I came with and I have learned
to ask new questions of Digital Natives practice. I don’t have a
definition that explains the work that these Digital Natives do. But I
now have a framework of what is their understanding of the political and
what are the various points of engagement and investment.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/political'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/political</a>
</p>
No publishernishantDigital ActivismDigital NativesPoliticalYouthFeaturedCyberculturesDigital subjectivitiesWorkshop2011-08-04T10:30:51ZBlog EntryPleasure and Pornography: Pornography and the Blindfolded Gaze of the Law
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/the-blindfolded-gaze-of-the-law-and-pornography
<b>In the legal discourse, pornography as a category is absent, except as an aggravated form of obscenity. Does this missing descriptive category assist in the rampant circulation of pornography, either online or offline? Rather than ask that question, Namita Malhotra, in this second post documenting her CIS-RAW project, explores certain judgments that indeed deal with pornographic texts and uncovers the squeamishness that ensures that pornography as an object keeps disappearing before the law.
</b>
<p><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>When Justicia, blindfolded, cannot see the profane …</strong><br /><br />In the legal discourse, pornography as a category is absent, except as an aggravated form of obscenity (1). Does this missing descriptive category assist in the rampant circulation of pornography, either online or offline? Rather than ask that question, I would like to explore certain judgments that indeed deal with pornographic texts and uncover the squeamishness that ensures that pornography as an object keeps disappearing before the law.</p>
<p>For instance, in the case of Fatima Riswana V. Chennai & Ors. (2) both the public prosecutor and counsel for the petitioners applied to the court for transfer to another (male) judge, to save the District Lady Judge from embarrassment. The order for transfer was passed, so that the District Lady Judge does not have to view certain CDs that are part of the evidence. The justification for this is that the 'said trial would be about the exploitation of women and their use in sexual escapades by the accused, and the evidence in the case is in the form of CDs, viewing of which would be necessary in the course of the trial; therefore, for a woman Presiding Officer it would cause embarrassment'.</p>
<p>This is a rather obvious case, where explicit and pornographic material is made to disappear before the eyes of the law, gesturing towards the larger complicity that allows society and law to create a ruckus about Richard Gere and Shilpa Shetty’s kiss, HBO's English movie channel, dance bars and other such aspects of the sleazy modernity that we inhabit (3), but simultaneously is oblivious to circulation of pornography, both online and offline.</p>
<p>In a rather confrontational visual juxtaposition, I place Savita Bhabhi alongside Husain’s Mother India, to be able to ask several questions, including the question of which one’s existence has been more threatened by the law. There is almost no doubt about it; Savita Bhabhi’s chequered career as a slutty housewife has been marred only by two scandals (and several almost patriotic accounts of India having finally arrived (4)) – once when a child sent an MMS about his teacher and it made references to Savita Bhabi, which led to some mention of action that might be taken against the website (5), and another time when Karan Johar (Mid Day, Delhi – 31 March 2009) remarked that one of the characters, Jeet, has a look similar to that given to Amitabh Bachchan in 'Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna', and this might be a case of copyright infringement. Neither of these have resulted in any serious charge against the alleged anonymous producers, Indian Porn Empire, or what is more probable, the blocking of the website regardless of whether the producers/creators can be found and prosecuted. However Husain’s untitled painting, which surfaced on a website for an auction for victims of a Kashmir earthquake in 2006 (two years after it was first sold by the painter), was dragged to court on serious charges of obscenity, which fortunately led to a rather progressive judgment on obscenity by the Delhi High Court.</p>
<p>Returning to the two images of nude women, obscenity law in India has laid down that “nudity in art and literature is not per se evidence of obscenity”. As stated in the judgment that dealt with the circulation of Hussain’s untitled painting (later titled 'Bharat Mata') 'the work as a whole must be considered, the obscene matter must be considered by itself and separately to find out whether it is so gross and its obscenity so decided that it is likely to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to influences of this sort'. What renders an object obscene is the transaction rather than the text -- a transaction involving the depiction-consumption of the female body , and the sexualisation of the viewer who in turn sexualises the object. It is not just that the painting/image may already be sexualized but also that the public is in turn sexualised by looking at it (and sexualises it with its
gaze), thus making them vulnerable to the perversion that is modernity
itself and the pornographic gaze (Nitya Vasudevan and Namita A. Malhotra, State of Desire - Unpublished article). To put it simply, the anxiety of the state is not just about the object, but also about its circulation in the public, and the meanings it acquires through these series of transactions.</p>
<p>Legal and public discourse is often obsessed with the various meanings that become possible because of the placing of this naked body - or the transactions of this naked body with the context, background, narrative that it is placed in. Though seemingly sexualised already as a naked body (this can be refuted not only by the Indian court but various examples in art, religious architecture, etc.) the meanings it may carry are further complicated when it is placed in a pornographic comic online, bearing a crown and saying 'I will be Miss India', or as a faceless hazy outline in the foreground of the map of India. Hussain’s depiction of the naked woman on the map of India, embodying India (in pain or anger) carries many jostling, conflicting meanings. Inspite of the furore over the painting, the High Court finally held that the painting was not obscene, stating that the intention of the painter was to evoke sympathy for a woman – indeed a nation – in distress (6) . However what is intriguing, is that Savita Bhabi’s body, her markings of Indian-ness, her poses and postures are not examined to that extent either by the court or the public.</p>
<p>Pornography, as obscenity in its aggravated form or explicit depiction of sexual acts without a relevant or coherent narrative, has been dropped from both legal discourse and academic and cultural analysis--is it possible to surmise that this has happened because it can be read as a blank slate, a place where meanings cannot be read, felt or inferred? Pornographic movies are spliced into mainstream films, circulate
surreptitiously through video stores, piracy markets or though online
spaces that cannot be easily accessed because of regulations and
filters in most places –- colleges, homes, schools, offices, cybercafes
(7) etc. Can we surmise that the transaction of the sexualized gaze with the obscene object has been, in this way, so removed from public gaze that it does not merit discomfort and anxiety for the state or public, unless it nefariously slips into public discourse (DPS MMS, Noida MMS, Mysore Mallige)? As long as it is a secretive (even if mass) consumption, it does not disturb the heternormative familiar and familial in the manner that an object whose obscenity is not quite obvious or clear does – for example, HBO's English movie channel (8).</p>
<p>In this context, let us look at an excerpt from the progressive judgment on Hussain’s painting, which demonstrates the extent to which the court has to read the meanings of an image to determine whether it is obscene or not, but simultaneously, by not ever having to interact with a pornographic text, the court (or the public) does not have to see that there are many meanings embedded in such an image as well.</p>
<p><em>'One of the tests in relation to judging nude/semi nude pictures of women as obscene is also <strong>a particular posture or pose or the surrounding circumstances</strong> which may render it to be obscene, but in the present painting, apart from what is already stated above, the <strong>contours of the woman’s body represent nothing more than the boundaries/map of India.</strong><br /></em></p>
<p><em>Even if a different view had to be taken that if the painter wanted to depict India in human form, it may have been<strong> more appropriate to cloth the woman in some manner may be by draping a sari </strong>or by a flowing cloth etc., but that alone cannot be made a ground to prosecute the painter.</em> <em>There can be a numbers of postures or poses that one can think of which can really stimulate a man’s deepest hidden passions and desires. To my mind, art should not be seen in isolation without going into its onomatopoetic meaning and it is here I quote Mr. Justice Stewart of the US Supreme Court in Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964) who defined ‘obscenity’ as, “I will know it when I see it”. The nude woman in the impugned painting is not shown in any peculiar kind of a pose or posture nor are her surroundings so painted which may arouse sexual feelings or that of lust in the minds of the deviants in order to call it obscene. The </em><em><strong>placement of the Ashoka Chakra</strong> or the States in the painting
is also not on any particular body part of the woman which may be
deemed to show disrespect to the Ashoka Chakra/States and the same was
conceded by the learned counsel for the respondent during the course of
the arguments advanced. </em></p>
<p><em>It is possible that some persons may hold a more orthodox or conservative view on the depiction of Bharat Mata as nude in the painting but that itself would not suffice to give rise to a criminal prosecution of a person like the petitioner who may have more liberal thoughts in respect of mode and manner of depiction of Bharat Mata.' </em>(9)</p>
<p>A body that doesn’t carry inscriptions of cities on different body parts, but is definitely inscribed as Indian is that of Savita Bhabi – from the mangalsutra that never comes off even during doggy-style sex, the sari that slips off rather easily, the bindi, the gestures and mannerisms, to the stories that place her in sexual encounters with familiar people – the bra salesman, the old boyfriend, the cousin, the doctor, the woman colleague, the boss, the aging star and many others.</p>
<p>Savita Bhabhi thus carries as many confusing, jostling meanings as a pornographic text. For instance, she refers to recession and aspirations to become Miss India. She ventures into the fantasy world of her fans, since many of her stories are drawn from their stories on the Savita Bhabi website and fansite –- whether these stories are make-believe or true is irrelevant. These resonances of the text beyond mere sexual arousal are obvious. Even if one were to ignore Linda Williams (10) and inferences from Foucault that pornography becomes one of the many forms in which knowledge of pleasure is organised, it is obvious that from varied perspectives within film studies and legal studies, pornography merits examination. Williams' point also seems to provide some insight into why pornographic circulation doesn't merit much anxiety from the state or in the law; if pornography is organised in consonance with the heteronormative familiar and familial and accessible primarily by men, then maybe it is not such a big surprise that the state or the law is not really invested in controlling pornography, since pornography itself is controlling modes of sexuality and/or sexual expression.</p>
<p>Returning to the comparison, Hussain's untitled nude body on the map of India is literally marked. She carries these inscriptions -- Gujarat on one breast, Bangalore between her thighs, Chennai on her calves, Goa on her hip. Savita Bhabi is marked by her sari, her bindi, her blouse, her aesthetic sense, her fantasies of film stars, her stories of encounters in dressing rooms and myriad other recognizable details -- that mark her as Indian, or at least as living in India, in an Indian (albeit a privileged fair North Indian) body. However, it is Husain's untitled painting -- not called Bharat Mata (and the painting doesn't seem to signify a maternal relation but that of a wounded woman or pained woman) -- that goes to court on charges of obscenity.</p>
<p>Before looking at the few judgments that deal with the actual pornographic text, I take a detour to look at another iconic female figure -- that of Justice. Though clothed, she is blindfolded, so as to be able to discern even a fraction of a slip in the scales of justice; visual cognition would not be sufficient for her to recognise such a slip. As explained by Costas Douzinas, ('The Legality of the Image, lecture – December, 1999), ‘Justice must be blindfolded to avoid the temptation of facing the concrete person and putting individual characteristics before the abstract logic of the institution'. Martin Jay traces the trajectory of how justice became blindfolded through the ages, in the article 'Must Justice Be Blind' (11). Justice was initially wide-eyed and alert; she was blindfolded by the Fool in a period when corruption of the rulers was rampant; she was immortalised by Vermeer as staring at empty scales; and in a transitory state before being completely blinded she had two heads, with a pair of eyes that could see, and a pair that was blindfolded -- shielded, maybe, from the profane and from embarrassment.</p>
<p>I look at this blindness of the judicial system that allows pornography to circulate, while pinning down the obscene and examining minutely its various meanings. The obscene ('Satyam Shivam Sundarmam', 'Prajapati' – a Bengali magazine which carries short stories, 'Lady Chatterley’s Lover', 'Bandit Queen') is examined firstly, for whether it is so gross, though grossness or vulgarity as such is not enough to establish obscenity. And secondly, for whether it has the tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such influences and into whose hands -- or rather, vision -- such an object might fall (this is what allows for the circulation in limited publics -- adult audiences, time slots on television). <br /><br /><strong>Hard and Near Hard Pornography: Close Encounters of the Law with the Profane</strong></p>
<p>In the case of Anonymous vs. the Commissioner Of Police (12), yet another encounter takes place between the embarrassed law and the pornographic text. The excerpt below describes the encounter of two women advocates asked by the court to examine what movies are being exhibited at a specific theatre. In the peculiar clash of social mores, that ensure who has access to pornography, and the law, that ensures equal access to all legally sanctioned media to everyone, the movie theatre was held responsible for violating the fundamental right of women to have access to their premises -- and thus access to pornography. <br /><br /><em>'We approached the booking counter of Rs. 20/- and asked for tickets. The booking clerk first informed us that it is an English movie and it is not meant for ladies to view. When we insisted for tickets, he asked us to come inside the booking room from the main entrance of the theatre. When we were entering the theatre, the gate-man informed us that ladies are not permitted as it is a "SEX MOVIE".</em></p>
<p><em>However, we walked into the booking room. Booking clerk issued us Box-A tickets and further asked us to see the Manager before taking seats. We did not see the Manager but directly went to Box-A and took seats. Even the Box-A doorman asked us to leave the theatre advising us that we being ladies cannot see it as the movie is a "SEX MOVIE". When the movie began at 12.00 P.M. simultaneously the Manager along with two men switched on the lights in Box-A and asked us to leave the hall immediately. Since he repeatedly insisted us to leave, we both came out of Box-A. On coming out we enquired as to why we should not see the movie, to which the Manager replied that it is a "BF". On asking for further clarification of "BF", the Manager stated that it means "BLUE FILM". When we asked him to identify himself, he informed us that he is Mr. Prasad, Manager of the Theatre, as such he has every right to ask us to leave. When we asked as to how it was not advertised that the movie is meant for men only, he retorted that "It is understood that whenever English movies are played in this theatre, ladies are strictly not permitted." As such we were forced to leave the theatre immediately.'</em><br /><br />The question before the court was whether the films exhibited in this theatre were being exhibited in accordance with the censor certificate or whether there was any tampering; whether there was any other device or contrivance to interpolate or intermingle blue films with any otherwise innocent-looking film. Here, though the court had taken it upon itself to address the pornographic text, it ran into a series of complications when merely trying to access the text or the evidence itself, as two women advocates were sent to determine if there was an illegal film exhibition taking place. Pornography seems to be continuously disappearing even on the rare occasion when it is addressed directly by the court, especially in the court's attempt to precisely locate the moment of transaction of the gaze with the pornographic object.</p>
<p>The court, when allowed to examine the film exhibited, found that it was 'a hotch potch of short films, advertisement films, party propaganda films, Hindi and Telugu feature film bits'. (13) The court finally located the pornographic segments (squeezing breasts in a tub, cunnilingus, brutal murder scene) and the court’s comment was that 'normal scenes were replaced by sexy scenes'. The recommendation of those who examined the films that were ostensibly being spliced into <em>Secret Games 3</em> and <em>Dark Dancers</em> is that, 'The only course proper is not to permit entry into the country for such films which prima facie may be <strong>classified hard or near-hard</strong>'. Though the term near-hard is amusing and unique classification of pornography, maybe it's a Freudian slip by a judicial system caught between disgusted arousal and embarrassment.</p>
<p>Finally, in this judgment, the court had to acknowledge its own blindness -- that there is ‘some hole somewhere in the system so that even excised portions by the Censor Board of the films have found their way to the theatres’, including portions that were never passed through the censor certification process at all. <br /><strong><br />Whose Hard-On (or Near Hard-On) Are We Looking for: The Law in Its Search for the Profane</strong><br /><br />In 2005, two teenagers frolicking were captured on a mobile phone camera, and the clip circulated first through mobile phones and then subsequently on the internet. The clip sparked off a phenomenon of hidden camera and mobile phone clips -- a booming pornographic enterprise now on the internet. For a split second, it seemed as though any kind of desire could become pornographic, captured in an ubiquitous medium and transmitted throughout the country. That thrill and anxiety was possibly grasped at slightly in Anurag Kashyap’s <em>Dev.D</em>, where Chanda -- the prostitute, or the other of the good girl -- is the one depicted as the unknown girl who was part of the MMS clip. Very few films have been able to grasp the visceral embarrassment and immediacy of desire as <em>Dev.D</em> does, and it is possibly not the story of Chanda, but that of Paro that achieves this. Paro, who sends nude pictures of herself across continents; Paro, the cyber-sexer; Paro, the entirely relatable slut who cycles with a mattress across fields of mustard in small town Punjab because she desires sex.</p>
<p>After three and a half years (countless MMSs, one movie reference, and a few academic articles later) the court passes judgment in this case – of who possibly can be held liable for the circulation of the MMS clip online, and specifically its sale on Bazee.com (an eBay subsidiary) by an IIT student (Avnish Bajaj vs State on 29/5/2008 by Muralidhar J.). In this case, it is not the pornographic text that keeps slipping and eluding the grasp of the court; the problem is in the inability, especially in the age of the internet, to fix the transactions around such an object that is rapidly changing hands and circulating at an exponential speed through the internet.</p>
<p>The court is in a bind -- the wrong person is accused. Not the corporate body of Bazee but the CEO of Bazee himself (the boy is a juvenile so is facing lesser charges in the juvenile court). The court has the responsibility to fix the blame of the circulation of the obscene object on Avinash Bajaj, without being able to establish that there is any knowledge on his part about the existence of the clip. Though the court was able to establish that there was negligence on the part of Bazee in running the website (in spite of notification, the clip remained on sale for a whole working day after the complaint), and that the filters used by Bazee were obviously inadequate to control what is sold through the website, it was still not possible to find the CEO liable for obscenity charges. If the company had been charged, this would have been possible. Eventually, even though obscenity as a charge couldn’t stick, similar provisions in the IT Act (Section 67 read with Section 85) were used to charge Avinash Bajaj himself, as opposed to Bazee (the corporate body or the company itself). </p>
<p>Here again the court is forced to confront a pornographic text only in instances where there has been a public furore around it, and the eventual judgment is not likely to be able to even remotely address the phenomenon of MMS clips and hidden camera footage from cybercafes and hostels that has been spawned as a result of this incident. The slippery transaction of the gaze with the pornographic object is difficult to fix though in a different way from the earlier judgment – here the pornographic nature of the text is understood rather than examined, more for its violation of privacy than actual elements of obscenity. But it is still hard to determine for the law, especially with the internet, how and by whom has circulation of the pornographic object has taken place and to fix these transactions to ensure legal culpability.</p>
<p>*****<br />Curiously this tale of women advocates and judges as representatives of law and justice, who are averting their gaze from the pornographic text or find that the text is constantly eluding their legal stare, must deal in its closure with the figure of the male judge. Anne McClintock’s male judge in her article ‘Screwing the System’ (14) is a judge who gets a hard-on each time he sentences a prostitute -- a judge who otherwise pays to be beaten by the very same prostitutes. The Hidayatullah paradox of obscenity law is that the judge who decides on obscenity has to decide on the basis of whether he is affected, or rather aroused -- and if he is turned on, then how is he any longer the reasonable judge, or even the 'reasonable man' who can be expected to pass judgment with the dispassionate authority of law? The work of both Shrimoyee N. Ghosh (on the dance bar judgment) and Lawrence Liang (on cinema and the law) on the relation between law and affect, gestures towards an interesting puzzle for us to consider here: if we could look into the eyes of justice, if she were not blindfolded, what would we see? And is the purpose of the blindfold indeed to prevent us from observing the affective life of law itself – its arousal, disgust and embarrassment?</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Endnotes:</strong></p>
<p>1. Ranjit Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra. Only in the recent fairly progressive judgment on Hussain’s painting, that held eventually after examining it, that it was not obscene, was there an attempt at giving some distinction to the category of pornography apart from it being an aggravated form of obscenity and to say that it, as a class of objects, images, paintings, videos, is designed for sexual arousal, while other material which may or may not be obscene is meant to have other meanings. Such reading of the author’s intentions is a convoluted way of restating Justice Potter’s statement – 'I know it (hard core), when I see it'. <br />2. Fatima Riswana v. State Rep. By A.C.P., Chennai & Ors.Case No.: Appeal (crl.) 61-62 of 2005<br />3. -'…in a clear shift of subject matter, what we are now seeing is an explicitly politicized moral censor looking at all this—looking not so much at the sex industry as at society-in-general, at society itself now theatricalised into a morbid stage of sleaze'. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, in his essay ‘Is Realism Pornographic?,’ which deals with the writings of Pramod Navalkar, former Minister for Culture in Maharashtra, points to how explicit or hard-core pornography does not seem to be the concern as much as a whole range of practices attached to the phenomenon of modernity<br />4. Anastasia Guha, The Beatitudes Of A Bountiful Bhabhi, Tehelka, Vol 5, Issue 19, Dated May 17, 2008. Available online at http://www.tehelka.com/story_main39.asp?filename=hub170508the_beatitudes.asp <br />5. Savitha Bhabi threatened, http://infotech.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/3476748.cms <br />6. For instance, the court held that in Bandit Queen, the nudity during the sequence of rape and torture of Phoolan Devi is necessary in the narrative and essential for the impact and the moral that the story is trying to convey – her anger with the upper caste feudal landlords and her quest for justice become identifiable for the viewer, and hence the nudity is in fact necessary in the story, and has no ‘tendency to deprave or corrupt’.<br />7. The regulation of cybercafes takes place in a manner reminiscent of how cinema spaces such as movie theatres were sought to be regulated by the colonial law. Current laws demand placing of computers so monitors face outward, use of identity cards for every visit, data retention for at least a month for most users, etc. <br />8. Though the latter might be a valid assumption (and certainly beneficial for us) it is an assumption whose presumptuous certainties are shaken in the age of the internet, especially that primarily men access pornography and cyber sex through these newly opening up online spaces.<br />9. Maqbool Fida Husain v. Raj Kumar Pandey CRL. REVISION PETITION No. 114/2007. Decided on 08-05-2008</p>
<p>10. Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989<br />11. Costas Douzinas, Lynda Nead (Eds), Law and the Image: the Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law. University of Chicago Press, 1999<br />12. Anonymous Letter-Un-Signed vs The Commissioner Of Police And Others on 26 December, 1996<br />13. For a judicial system that is invested in narrative film or narrative structure for reasons of copyright law (see generally Anne Baron, The Legal Property of Film) or for aesthetic reasons, as is evident from the judgment in Bandit Queen (that held nudity when she was paraded naked in front of the villagers to not be obscene because those scenes are needed for a narrative impact – for people to feel moved and disgusted by Phoolan Devi’s plight) it must also be a different kind of horror to find films chopped up into twenty sundry pieces, the last piece thrown somewhere else.<br />14. Anne McClintock, Screwing the System: Sexwork, Race and the Law, Boundary 2, Vol. 19, No. 2, Feminism and Postmodernism (Summer, 1992), 70-95. <br /><br /></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/the-blindfolded-gaze-of-the-law-and-pornography'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/the-blindfolded-gaze-of-the-law-and-pornography</a>
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No publishernamitahistories of internet in IndiaObscenityinternet and societyArtcybercultureswomen and internetYouTubeCyberculturescyberspacesDigital subjectivitiesHistory2011-08-02T08:37:23ZBlog EntryPleasure and Pornography: Impassioned Objects
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/impassioned-objects-unraveling-the-history-of-fetish
<b>In this post, a third in the series documenting her CIS-RAW project, Pleasure and Pornography, Namita Malhotra explores the idea of fetish as examined by Anne McClintock (i) . This detour is an exploration of the notion of fetish, its histories and meanings, and how it might relate to the story of Indian porn. </b>
<p><br />The etymology of fetish derives from the word fetico (Portuguese) which means sorcery or magic arts. In 1760, it was used to refer to primitive religions, especially in relation to the growing project of imperialism. In 1867, Marx coined the term commodity fetishism – using the implied meaning of primitive magic to express the central social form of modern industrial economy, whereby the social relation between people metamorphoses into the relation between things. It was only after this, in 1905, that Freud transferred the word, with all these meanings still clinging to it, to the realm of sexuality and perversions. As Anne McClintock points out, in her useful account and re-understanding of the fetish in the book <em>Imperial Leather</em> (ii), psychoanalysis, philosophy, and Marxism all take shape around the invention of the primitive fetish, which conveniently displaces what the modern mind cannot accommodate onto the invented domain of the primitive. She states that the not-so-concealed rationale of imperialism is fetishism. Fetishists (racial, sexual and other) became a mode of warranting and justifying conquest and control -- whether it was the policing of sexual fetishism for control of classes in Europe and colonies, or the invention of racial fetishism central to the regime of imposing sexual surveillance in the colonies.<strong> The imperial discourse on fetishism became a discipline of containment</strong> (iii) .</p>
<p>On the other hand in the realm of sexuality, fetish becomes a question of male sexuality alone -- male perversion par excellence. There are no female fetishists, either for Freud or Lacan, for to speak of female fetishism would involve displacing the basic precepts of psychoanalysis -- namely the scene of castration leading to phallic fetishism. However, McClintock points to the usefulness of studying female fetishism, as it allows for certain things to happen. First, it dislodges the centrality of the phallus in this discourse, which surprisingly makes way for the presence and legitimacy of a multiplicity of pleasures, needs, and contradictions that can’t be resolved or reduced merely to the desire to preserve the phallus. Very often, feminists such as McClintock read the Lacanian insistence on the centrality of the phallus as itself a fetishistic nostalgia for a single, male myth of origins and fetishistic disavowal of difference. Such a notion of fetish, embedded in phallic theory, gets easily reduced to sexual difference and does not allow/admit race or class as crucially formative categories as well; thus, race and class remain continuously of secondary status in the primarily sexually signifying chain.</p>
<p>“The racist fetishizing of white skin, black fetishizing gold chains, the fetishizing of black dominatraces, lesbians, cross dressing as men the fetishizing of national flags, slave fetishism, class cross-dressing, fetishes such as nipple clips and bras in male transvestism, leather bondage, PVC fetishism, babyism and so on -- these myriad different deployments of fetishistic ambiguity cannot be categorized under a single mark of desire, without great loss of theoretical subtlety and historical complexity.” Also McClintock points to racist, nationalistic and patriotic fetishes -- such as flags, crowns, maps, swastikas (or for instance chaddis) -- that can’t be simply rendered equivalent to the disavowal of male castration anxiety. <br /><br />McClintock calls for a renewed investigation of fetishism -- to open it up to a more complex and valuable history in which racial and class hierarchies would play as formative a role as sexuality. Rejecting the Lacanian and Freudian fixation on the phallus as central to psychoanalysis would call for a mutually transforming investigation into the disavowed relations of psychoanalysis and social history. In a way, it would be the bringing together of the varied ways in which fetish has been used -- by Freud (in the domain of psychoanalysis) in the realm of domesticity and the private, and by Marx (in the domain of male socio-economic history) in the realm of the market and possibly in the public. If these meanings were to speak to each other, what we discover is that fetish is in fact the historical enactment of ambiguity itself.</p>
<p>Fetishism involves the displacement onto an object of contradictions that the individual cannot resolve at a personal level. These contradictions could indeed be social, though lived with profound intensity in the imagination and flesh of the person. The fetish -- rather than being a merely an insignificant sexual or personal practice -- inhabits both personal and historical memory. It marks a crisis in social meaning -- the embodiment of an impossible resolution. This crisis/contradiction is displaced onto and embodied in the fetish object, which is thus destined to recur in compulsive ways. By displacing this power onto the fetish, then manipulating or controlling the fetish, the individual gains symbolic control over what might otherwise be terrifying ambiguities.</p>
<p>The fetish then can be called an impassioned object; something that emerges from a variety of social contradictions, rather than merely from the scene of castration or phallic centric domains. Hence they are neither universal, nor are they entirely about personal histories alone, but are about personal and historical memory or a social contradiction that is experienced at an intensely personal level. “As composite symbolic objects, fetishes thus embody the traumatic coincidence not only of individual but also of historical memories held in contradiction” (McClintock). This reading of fetishism gives rise to far richer possibilities of cultural analysis.</p>
<p>Fetish was neither proper to African or Christian European culture, but sprang into being from an abrupt encounter between two heterogeneous worlds during an era of mercantile capitalism and slavery. At this point it clearly embodies the problem of contradictory social value -- whether it is gold as valuable, or gold as warding off bad luck. Though initially just about heathen customs and rituals, it later also becomes a marking of certain groups of people for conquest. It is from this context that Freud transports the word, laden with meanings of conquest and violence, to the realm of sexuality. Obviously these meanings stain future connotations of fetish, the word fetish itself becoming prey to contradictory meanings of race and sex and difference.</p>
<p>For Freud, the fetish is the embodiment in one object of two positions -- castration and its denial. Though this does capture some sense of the ambiguity that McClintock also refers to, here the meanings oscillate between two, and only two, fixed options (a recurring male economy). The fetish becomes both a permanent memorial to the horror of castration, embodied not in the male but in the female -- as well as a token of triumph, and safeguard against the threat of castration. This has, of course, been critiqued by feminists quite severely. McClintock’s basic argument is that it is indeed hard, considering the varied nature of fetish objects, to find a single originary explanation in the psychic development of the individual -- in a single originary trauma. What is important here, however is to take on this notion of the fetish as an historical enactment of ambiguity itself, and see if as a theoretical concept it has any value to the study of the loose category of Indian porn, especially MMS porn. <br /><br /><strong>Soap in these strange days: fetish objects</strong><br /><br /><em>“Such spectacle creates the promise of a rich sight: not the sight of particular fetishized objects, but sight itself as richness, as the grounds for extensive experience.”<br />Dana Polan (iv)</em><br /><br />Anne McClintock’s work on fetish also looks at the seemingly ubiquitous object of soap as the carrier of many ambiguous meanings around gender, class, imperialism -- both the cult of domesticity (the running of the empire of home with servants, sweepers, cleaners, women, maids etc.) and the cult of new imperialism found in soap in its exemplary mediating form. The story of soap, for McClintock, reveals that fetishism rather than a quintessentially African propensity (belonging in the realm of lands and peoples that were being discovered through imperialism) was in fact central to industrial modernity; fetishism was not original either to industrial capitalism or precolonial economies, but was from the outset the embodiment and record of an incongruous and violent encounter (between two or more heterogenous cultures) and about rapid changes of modernity, rather than about the ‘primitive’. <br /><br />Marx says that the mystique of the commodity fetish lies not in its use value, but in its exchange value and its potency as a sign: “So far as (a commodity) is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it”. This could be linked to the idea of a mobile phone that is supposed to achieve so much beyond mere communication, at least according to the advertising -- they should mend ruptured relations and homes, get all the hot chicks, grow beautiful gardens, change the boring routine of life. For some time, the Samsung mobile phone ad with Estella Warren played in India, which probably moves the mobile phone with camera out of merely its symbolic use as enhancing attractiveness, to actually ‘getting’ or rather capturing girls by clicking. Magically in the ad, the act of clicking photographs make the girl not just willing, but she also takes the phone and photographs herself. Barring one scary moment when it looks like she might turn into an avenging warrior like Xena or The Bride, but instead she simpers into a loving sexy pose, she is willing. The ad can’t be easily dismissed as misogynistic, but it does give an intriguing glimpse of the intimate pictures and moments that can be captured with a mobile phone. <br /><br />That a mobile phone is fetishized as a commodity is probably evident, from the rush to get the more enhanced phone with the better camera and features, though mobile phones are also a ubiquitous element of one’s life, in some ways exactly like soap. Probably in a country like India, having a mobile phone can be read as opening up sexual possibilities in a way that wouldn’t be obvious in a more developed country. If the fetish is a social contradiction that is experienced at an intensely personal level, then the mobile phone, especially after the DPS MMS clip, is precariously located between the zones of the private and personal, and that which is entirely in the public domain beyond any control of the person(s). This ability of the mobile phone to occupy simultaneous universes because of its interconnectedness in a network, and that it is (for most people now) an entirely personal object with messages, numbers, conversations, images, videos, is what makes it unpredictable. <br /><br /><strong>Looking at MMS porn</strong><br /><em>“Memories were meant to fade. They were built that way for a reason”<br />Mace, Strange Days</em><br /><br />When looking at MMS porn, I’m irresistibly reminded of the movie <em>Strange Days</em>, in which Angela Basset’s character Mace expresses her frustration with Lenny (played by Ralph Fiennes). Lenny is obsessed with preserving memory and accessing other people’s experiences, through what in the movie are called playbacks. Playbacks are recordings of events in the brain that were fed back into brain waves to reproduce the earlier event -- the feelings, the sensations of touch, the smells and not just the visual. Playbacks haven’t been invented yet, but the obsessiveness with which Lenny wheels and deals (he’s also a dealer and collector of playbacks) gives a peculiar insight into how mobile phones are becoming fetish objects of sorts -- particularly MMSs recorded on mobile phones where other people are able to occupy the space of an unknown character that conveniently rarely ever appears on the screen. The famous pornographic ones are the DPS MMS clip and other MMS scandals, including the hidden voyeuristic ones taken without permission, and a precursor of this is Mysore Mallige where the man appears rarely on the screen and only at the end, almost like a signature. In a peculiar way MMS porn becomes like playback from Strange Days, a movie that is attempting to unravel the unknown future mired in technological changes that are messily intertwined with human desire and frailty. A future (set on the date of turning the millennium) that we’ve hopelessly gone past without even asking many of the questions that the characters in the movie pose.<br /><br />Indian websites advertise MMS scandals as a specific category of pornography. This category also includes genuine MMS clips of celebrities kissing (Kareena Kapoor), wardrobe malfunctions from Fashion Week, and also fake ones with celebrity look-alikes bathing, changing, having sex (Preity Zinta, Mallika Sherawat). Mostly what is being talked about are videos made on mobile phones by men, who record themselves having sex with ‘gullible’ women. The alleged gullibility of these women is probably essential to the erotic charge of such videos. They are shaky videos, especially when sex is underway, and have a grainy quality that makes them eerily real. Their perspective is usually that of the man who is holding the phone camera and rarely enters the frame himself, whereas the woman is definitely the desirable object that is being captured. Maybe this phenomenon can be understood better if one looks at McClintock’s idea of fetish and whether MMS/images on mobile phones can be located within that category -- whether the ambiguous nature of the video or image recorded on the mobile phone and its ability to be an intensely personal and private object and also to be so easily transmitted into networks signifies a crisis in social meanings around private and public. The mobile phone then merely becomes an object onto which this anxiety is displaced, and the recording of images repeatedly (and anxieties and fears triggered when they accidentally slip into the public domain) are ways of trying to control terrifying ambiguities over the private and the public (where aspects of sexuality, family and selfhood could be calamitously disrupted by a slip between the two categories). (v)<br /><br />In a strange way this is a parable for a larger phenomenon of pornographic circulation and the law, as well. The mass circulation of pornography is perceived as a private secret that is kept by all, and whenever there is slip between the two categories, the law and public discourse are barely able to deal with the furore of anxieties. And if not, then the law and public discourse proceed to deal with the banal unbuttoning of Akshay Kumar’s jeans by his wife as obscenity in courtrooms, as if we hadn’t all imagined an MMS that allowed us to be doing the same. <br /><br /> i. Anne Mcclintok’s work on sadomasochism illuminates some of the arguments that I make in relation to sexual subjectivity and the state’s interests and desires in policing it. (unpublished article for book on queer issues and the law). Her work borrows from notions developed by Foucault. “Sadomasochism plays social power backwards, visibly and outrageously staging hierarchy, difference and power, the irrational, ecstasy or alienation of the body, placing these ideas at the centre of western reason.” The analysis of sexual subjectivity and State’s interest in it also looks at the judgment on sadomasochism by the House of Lords, England that declares such activities that cause severe injuries and maim the body, as illegal, regardless of consent of parties. <br />ii. Anne Mcclintok, Imperial Leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest, Routledge, 1995.<br />iii. Ibid<br />iv. Cited from Laura Mulvey, Some Thoughts on Theories of Fetishism in the Context of Contemporary Culture, October, Vol. 65 (Summer, 1993), pp. 3-20. </p>
<p>v. As in the story of Chanda in Dev.d loosely inspired from the DPS MMS clip incident<br /><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/uploads/kalkichanda.jpg/image_preview" alt="Chanda from Dev.d" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Chanda from Dev.d" /><br /><br /><br /></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/impassioned-objects-unraveling-the-history-of-fetish'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/impassioned-objects-unraveling-the-history-of-fetish</a>
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No publishernamitahistories of internet in IndiaCyberspaceinternet and societyObscenitywomen and internetYouTubeCyborgsCyberculturesDigital subjectivities2011-08-02T08:35:20ZBlog Entry