The Centre for Internet and Society
http://editors.cis-india.org
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Chutnefying English - Report
http://editors.cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/hinglish
<b>The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, was an institutional partner to India's first Global Conference on Hinglish - Chutnefying English, organised by Dr. Rita Kothari at the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad. A photographic report for the event is now available here.</b>
<p></p>
<p>In January of 2009, Dr. Rita Kothari, at the Mudra Institute
of Communications, Ahmedabad, organised the first global conference called “<a class="external-link" href="http://conferences.mica-india.net/">Chutneyfying
English</a>”, calling in various stakeholders from different walks of life –
academics, scholars, researchers, actors, cultural producers, authors and
consumers to critically examine the growing phenomenon of Hinglish and how it
intersects with our globalised lives. The two day conference brought together a
series of presentations, ranging from academic papers to lively round table
discussions to panels that looked at the different manifestations of Hinglish
and the political and aesthetic potential of this particular form. Scholars
like <a class="external-link" href="http://www.mica-india.net/AcademicsandResearch/Profiles/Profiles%20new/Rita.htm">Rita Kothari</a>, Harish Trivedi, <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/people/staff/nishant-shah" class="internal-link" title="Nishant Shah">Nishant Shah</a>, Daya Thussu, Shanon Finch and
Rupert Snell were complemented by cultural producers like <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nandita_Das">Nandita Das</a>, R. Raj
Rao, and <a class="external-link" href="http://www.arts.auckland.ac.nz/staff/index.cfm?S=STAFF_skot005">Shuchi Kothari</a>. Literary stakeholders like <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urvashi_Butalia">Urvashi
Bhutalia</a>, <a class="external-link" href="http://pipl.com/directory/people/Bachi/Karkaria">Bachi Karkaria</a>, and Tej Bhatia rubbed shoulders with more mainstream
practitioners like Prasoon Joshi, <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahesh_Bhatt">Mahesh Bhatt</a> and Cyrus Broacha.</p>
<p>The Centre for Internet and Society was an<a class="external-link" href="http://conferences.mica-india.net/sponsors.html"> institutional
partner</a> for the event, and supported the panel on New Media, which saw four
paper presentations and a discussion moderated by Nishant Shah, Director
Research at the CIS. The panel explored diverse presentations from Mattangi
Krishnamurthy, Pramod Nair and Supriya Gokarn, who looked at the diverse ways
in which the rise of Internet and digital technologies is not only changing the
ways in which people express themselves, but they are also leading to complex
ways in which new conditions of identity, consumption and politics are
manifesting themselves. Nishant Shah responded to the panel by positing the
idea of Hinglish as a paradigm, rather than a set of characteristics, which
goes beyond the questions of language and actually resides in the aesthetic
conditions of the internet technologies.</p>
<p>A photographic documentation of the event with an
introduction by Dr. Rita Kothari, the chief organiser and curator for the
conference is now available for a free download <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/research/conferences/Hinglish/at_download/file" class="external-link">here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/hinglish'>http://editors.cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/hinglish</a>
</p>
No publishernishantConferenceArtCyberculturesCommunitiesDigital subjectivitiesDigital Pluralism2009-08-27T06:03:23ZBlog EntryChange has come to all of us
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/change-has-come
<b>The general focus on a digital generational divide makes us believe that generations are separated by the digital axis, and that the gap is widening. There is a growing anxiety voiced by an older generation that the digital natives they encounter — in their homes, schools and universities and at workplaces — are a new breed with an entirely different set of vocabularies and lifestyles which are unintelligible and inaccessible. It is time we started pushing the boundaries of what it means to be a digital native. </b>
<p><strong>In this connected world, the geek is everyone — from a grandma on Skype to a teen on Second Life.</strong></p>
<p>Two self-proclaimed digital natives,
on a cold autumn morning in Amsterdam, decided to leave the comforts of
their familiar virtual worlds and venture into the brave new territories
of real-life shopping. Though slightly confused by the lack of
click-and-try options and perplexed by the limitations of the physical
spaces of shopping, we plodded along, shop after shop, thinking how much
easier it is to chat on IM while flying through Second Life as opposed
to face-to-face interactions while walking on crowded streets. After we
had run out of shops (and patience), we decided that it was time to rely
on better resources than our own wits. The Dutch girl fished out her
Android smartphone and with the single press of a button, opened up
channels of information. She called her mother. She asked for the
location of the store that was eluding us. And then she looked at me in
silence before bursting into laughter. Her 64-year-old mother, in
response to our question, had said, “Why don’t you just Google it?” <br /></p>
<p>We spent five minutes in stunned
laughter when we realised that we should have instinctively done that
and that we were being asked by somebody from Generation U to “get with
it”. Funny (and slightly embarrassing) as it is, it brings into focus,
the question, “Who is a digital native?” For those of you who have been
reading this column, it has been defined in terms of age and usage. A
digital native is generally somebody young, somebody who is tech-savvy,
somebody who can perform complicated calisthenics with digital
technologies — throwing virtual sheep, having instant relationships,
writing complex stories and pirating their favourite movies — in one
nonchalant click of the mouse. However, these kinds of digital natives
are only stereotypes.
</p>
<p>If we move away from
these descriptions of novelty, of excitement and of youth, a different
kind of digital native emerges for us. A digital native is somebody
whose way of thinking (about himself and the world around) is
significantly informed because of the presence of and familiarity with
the internet and digital technologies. In other words, a digital native
is a person who has experienced (and is often led to) change because of
their interactions with new technologies.
</p>
<p>It can be a
middle-aged man whose business changed when he started tracking his
supplies using complex and sophisticated databases. It can be a mother
of two, finding support and help raising her children on online
communities like Bing. It can be a senior teacher re-discovering
pedagogy through distributed knowledge systems on Wikipedia. It can be
grandparents who interact with their grandchildren over Skype and text
messaging, across international borders and lifestyles. It can be a
mother telling her digital native daughter to “just Google it!” over the
cellphone.
</p>
<p>And as things might
be, Shamini, my 15-year-old bonafide digital native correspondent from
Ahmedabad, recently wrote that she got off Facebook and deleted her
account. “It felt like I had retired from a job,” she said. But she was
away from Facebook only for four months, dissociated from all the “time,
energy and drama that it caused” and was quite enjoying it. After four
months of self-imposed exile, she, however, resurfaced on Facebook. And
it was to stay in touch with her aunt and uncle, who live in faraway
lands, and cannot keep in touch with her unless she is on Facebook.
Shamini was surprised at this. After spending much time convincing them
about trying to use email and phones to keep connected, she finally gave
in and started a new account that nobody knows of. And she asked me the
important question: Who is the digital native now?
</p>
<p>The general focus on
a digital generational divide makes us believe that generations are
separated by the digital axis, and that the gap is widening. There is a
growing anxiety voiced by an older generation that the digital natives
they encounter — in their homes, schools and universities and at
workplaces — are a new breed with an entirely different set of
vocabularies and lifestyles which are unintelligible and inaccessible.
It is time we started pushing the boundaries of what it means to be a
digital native.
</p>
<p>My grandmother used
to tell us, “Nobody is born knowing a language.” I think it is time to
start applying the same logic here. Nobody is born with technologies.
But there are people — perhaps not yet a generation, but still a
population — who are changing their lives and significantly transforming
the world by turning Google and Facebook and Twitter into verbs and a
way of doing things. So the next time, somebody asks you if you know a
digital native, don’t look for somebody out there — it might just be
you! <br /></p>
<p>The original column can be read in <a class="external-link" href="http://http://www.indianexpress.com/news/change-has-come-to-all-of-us/701505/0">The Indian Express</a><br /></p>
<p> </p>
<strong></strong>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/change-has-come'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/change-has-come</a>
</p>
No publishernishantGoogleDigital NativesCyberculturesFacebookDigital subjectivities2012-03-13T10:43:38ZBlog EntryA provisional definition for the Cultural Last Mile
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/definiton
<b>In the first of his entries, Ashish Rajadhyaksha gives his own spin on the 'Last Mile' problem that has been at the crux of all public technologies. Shifting the terms of debate away from broadcast problems of distance and access, he re-purposes the 'last mile' which is a communications problem, to make a cultural argument about the role and imagination of technology in India, and the specific ways in which this problem features in talking about Internet Technologies in contemporary India.</b>
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<p>In its classical
form, the ‘last mile’ is a communications term defining the final stage
of providing connectivity from a communications provider to a customer,
and has been used as such most commonly by telecommunications and cable
television industries. There has however been a a specific Indian
variant, seen in its most classical avatar in scientist Vikram
Sarabhai’s contention that overcoming the last mile could solve the two
major challenges India has faced, of <strong>linguistic diversity </strong>and <strong>geographical distance</strong>,
and mounted as the primary argument for terrestrial television in the
early 1980s. (I will try and attach the Sarabhai paper a little later
to this posting).</p>
<p>This specifically Indian variation, where technology was mapped onto
developmentalist-democratic priorities, has been the dominant
characteristic of communications technology since at least the
invention of the radio in the 1940s. For at least 50 years now, that
means, the last mile has become a mode of a techno-democracy, where
connectivity has been directly translated into democratic citizenship.
It has continuously provided the major rationale for successive
technological developments, from the 1960s wave of portable
transistors, the terrestrial transponders of the first televisual
revolution it the early 1980s (the Special Plan for the Expansion of
Television), the capacity of satellite since SITE and the INSAT series,
and from the 1990s the arrival of wired networks (LANs, Cable,
fibre-optic) followed by wireless (WLAN, WiMAX, W-CDMA). At each point
the assumption has been consistently made that the final frontier was
just around the corner; that the next technology in the chain would
breach a major barrier, once and for all.</p>
<p><strong>What I hope to do is to provide a historical account to
argue that the theory of the ‘last mile’ has been founded on
fundamental (mis)apprehensions around just what this bridge
constitutes. </strong>Further, that these apprehensions may have been
derived from a misconstruction of democractic theory, to assume, first,
an evolutionary rather than distributive model for connectivity, and
second, to introduce a major bias for broadcast (or one-to-many) modes
as against many-to-many peer-to-peer formats. The book, whenever I
succeed in writing it, will hope to argue the following:</p>
<p>1. It has been difficult to include <strong>human resource</strong>
as an integral component to the last mile. Contrary to the relentlessly
technologized definition of the last mile, it may perhaps be best seen
historically as <em>also</em>, and even perhaps <em>primarily</em>, a
human resource issue. This is not a new realization, but it is one that
keeps reproducing itself with every new technological generation<a href="http://culturallastmile.wordpress.com/#_ftn1">[1]</a>,
with ever newer difficulties. The endemic assumption, derived from the
broadcasting origins of the definition is that it is primarily the <em>sender</em>’s responsibility to bridge the divide, that <em>technology </em>can
aid him to do so on its own, and that such technology can negate the
need to define connectivity as a multiple-way partnership as it reduces
the recipient into no more than an intelligent recipient of what is
sent (the citizen model). On the other hand, it is possible to show how
previous successful experiments bridging the last mile have been ones
where <em>recipients have been successfully integrated into the communications model </em>both as peers and, even more significantly, as <em>originators </em>as well as <em>enhancers </em>of
data. Importantly, this paper will show, this has been evidenced even
in one-way ‘broadcast’ modes such as film, television and radio (in the
movie fan, community radio and the television citizen-journalist).</p>
<p>2. The one-way broadcast versus peer-to-peer versus two/multiple-way
debate needs to he historically revisited. The need to redefine the
beneficiary of a connectivity cycle as a full-fledged partner tends to
come up against a bias written into standard communications models –
and therefore several standard revenue models – that consistently tend
to underplay what this paper will call the <em>significant sender/recipient</em>.
While both terrestrial and satellite systems require some level of
peer-to-peer transmission systems to facilitate last-mile
communications, it has been a common problem that unless <em>either</em> a clear focus exists on geographic areas <em>or</em>
significant peer-to-peer participation exists, broadcast models
inevitably find themselves delivering large amounts of S/N at low
frequencies without sufficient spectrum to support large information
capacity. While it is technically possible to ‘flood’ a region in
broadcasting terms, this inevitably leads to extremely high wastage as
much of the radiated ICE never reaches any user at all. As information
requirements increase, broadcast ‘wireless mesh’ systems small enough
to provide adequate information distribution to and from a relatively
small number of local users, require a prohibitively large number of
broadcast locations along with a large amount of excess capacity to
make up for the wasted energy.</p>
<p>This problem, importantly, springs as much from a built-in <em>ideological </em>commitment
to one-way broadcasting formats, as from technological limitations. The
technology itself poses further problems given the bias of different
systems to different kinds of connectivity, and with it different types
of peer-to-peer possibilities. Rather than attempting a
one-size-fits-all model for all models to follow, we need to work out
different <em>synergies </em>between broadcast-dependent and peer-to-peer-enabled platforms.</p>
<p>This book will eventually hope to study the history of peer-to-peer
and multiple-way structures as systems where sending has become a
component part of receiving. Key technological precedents to the
present definition of the sender-communication ‘partner’ would be <strong>community radio</strong>, <strong>low-power transmission-reception systems </strong>(most famously the Pij experiment in Gujarat conducted by ISRO), and various <strong>internet-based networking models</strong>.</p>
<p>3. The need to revisit the technological community is therefore
critical. The key question is one of how technological communities have
been produced, and how they may be sustained. In January 2007, the
attack by V.S. Ailawadi, former Chairman, Haryana Electricty Regulatory
Commission, on India’s public sector telecom giants BSNL and MTNL for
keeping their ‘huge infrastructure’ of ‘copper wire and optic fibre’ to
themselves, when these could be used by private operators as cheaper
alternatives to WiMAX, W-CDMA and broadband over power lines, shows the
uneasy relationship between new players and state agencies. Mr.
Ailawadi’s contention that the ‘unbundling’ of the last mile would
bring in competition for various types of wireless applications and
broadband services not just for 45 million landlines but also for 135
million mobile users of various service providers, also therefore needs
to be revisited from the perspective of community formation. How would
the new 135 million mobile users be effectively tapped for their
capacity to become what we are calling significant senders?</p>
<p>In defining the last mile as to do with the recipient-as-sender, and thus the <strong>community</strong>, this paper will focus on a history of community action along specific models of connectivity. These are: cinema’s <strong>movie fan</strong>, internet’s <strong>blogger</strong> and <strong>networker</strong>, solar energy’s <strong>barefoot engineer</strong>, software’s <strong>media pusher</strong> and television’s <strong>citizen-journalist. </strong>A specific focus for study will be the models of <strong>participatory learning</strong> in the classroom, using <strong>film</strong>, the <strong>vinyl disc</strong>, the <strong>audio cassette</strong>, the <strong>radio</strong>, the <strong>television</strong>, the <strong>web </strong>and now the <strong>mobile phone</strong>.</p>
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<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/definiton'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/definiton</a>
</p>
No publishernishantA copy of this post is also available on the author's personal blog at http://culturallastmile.wordpress.com/2009/10/25/1-what-is-the-cultural-last-mile/ICT4DDigital GovernancePublic AccountabilityInternet GovernanceCyberculturesDigital subjectivities2011-08-02T08:57:07ZBlog Entry