The Centre for Internet and Society
http://editors.cis-india.org
These are the search results for the query, showing results 311 to 325.
Digital native: Look before you (digitally) leap
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-may-28-2017-digital-native-look-before-you-digitally-leap
<b>Creating a digital future is great, but there’s a serious need to secure the infrastructure first.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article was published in the <a class="external-link" href="http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-technology/digital-native-look-before-you-digitally-leap-4676270/">Indian Express</a> on May 28, 2017.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Digital technologies of connectivity have one unrelenting promise — they offer us new ways of doing things, augmenting existing practices, amplifying capacities and affording new possibilities of information and data transactions that accelerate the ways in which we live. This idea of the internet as infrastructure is central to India’s transition into an information technologies future.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Nandan Nilekani, almost a decade ago, in his book, Imagining India, had clearly charted how the digital is the basis for shaping the future of our communities, societies and governance. As one of the architects of Aadhaar, Nilekani had argued that the country of the 21st century will have to be one that seriously invests in the digital infrastructure.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In 10 short years, we have reached a point where we no longer question the enormous investment we make in digital systems of governance and functioning, and we appreciate the economic and networked values of projects like #DigitalIndia and #MakeInIndia that shape our markets and cities into becoming the new cyber-hubs.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There is no denying that digital offers a new way of consolidating a country as polyphonic, multicultural, expansive and diverse as India. We also have to appreciate that, even if selectively, the digitisation of public records, government services, and state support is clearly producing an administrative momentum that is reforming various practices of corruption and incompetence in the massive state machinery. The role of the digital as infrastructure has been a boon for many developing countries.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This positioning, however, masks the fact that infrastructure needs its own support and care systems. Take roads, for example. Roads allow for connectivity, movement and mobility between different spaces. They are one of the most important of state and public infrastructures and for all our jokes about pot-holes and eroding spaces for pedestrians, roads remain the life-line of our everyday life. A complex mechanism of planning, regulation and maintenance needs to be put into place in order to make roads survive.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The amount of attention we pay to roads — the material quality, the land that it occupies, the lanes for different vehicles, the traffic lights and zebra crossings, blockages and streamlines, authorising specific use of roads and disallowing certain activities to happen there — is staggering. A public planner would tell you that before the road comes into being, the idea of the road has to be formulated. The road needs protection and planning and its own infrastructure of support and creation.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">When it comes to the information superhighway of the digital web, this remains forgotten. We are so focused on the digital as infrastructure that we seem to pay no attention to its infrastructure. Thus, when we proposed, deployed and now enforced a project like Aadhaar, the focus remained on its unfolding and its operations. Aadhaar as an aspiration of governance has its values and has the capacity to become a system that augments statecraft.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, the infrastructure that is needed to make Aadhaar possible — rules and regulations around privacy, bills and acts about data sharing and ownership, contexts of informed consent and engagement, community awareness and data security protocol — have been missing from the debates. For years now, activists have been advising and warning the state that building this digital infrastructure without building the contexts within which they make sense is not just irresponsible, but downright dangerous.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Different governments have turned a deaf ear to these protests. Now, when the Aadhaar portals are found disclosing massive volumes of public data, making people vulnerable to data and identity theft and fraud, we are realising the massive projects we have started without thinking about the context of security.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">With the ongoing controversies around #AadhaarLeaks, the question is not whether the disclosure of this information was a leak, a breach or an ignorant exposure of sensitive information. The response to it cannot be just about fixing the infrastructure and building more robust systems. The question that we need to confront is how do we stop thinking of the internet as infrastructure and start focusing on the infrastructure that needs to be set into place so that these digital systems promise safety, security, and protection for the lives they intersect with.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-may-28-2017-digital-native-look-before-you-digitally-leap'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-may-28-2017-digital-native-look-before-you-digitally-leap</a>
</p>
No publishernishantBiometricsResearchers at WorkAadhaar2017-06-08T01:22:54ZBlog EntryDigital native: Lie Me a River
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-march-19-2017-digital-native-lie-me-a-river
<b>The sea of social media around us often drowns the truth, exchanging misinformation for facts.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img alt="Social media, Fake news, Fake messages on WhatsApp, Fake news problem, Snopes, Facebook, Google, WhatsApp forwards, technology, tech culture, tech news" class="size-full wp-image-4574844" src="http://images.indianexpress.com/2017/03/fakenews_big_1.jpg" style="float: none; " /><br /><span class="discreet">This basic process of truth telling loses all affordance in social media practices. Let me channel my inner school teacher and present you with a question.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">One of the most common methods of testing a student’s knowledge is the multiple choice question template that asks the examinee to identify one of four options as correct solutions to a problem. The pedagogic principle behind these questions is simple enough: We live in a world where truth and accuracy are important. No matter what our subjective feelings, impressions, memories or instincts might be, we need to rely on verifiable facts to make a truth claim. If we fail to do so, there would be negative consequences.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This basic process of truth telling loses all affordance in social media practices. Let me channel my inner school teacher and present you with a question. Drawing on samples of WhatsApp messages on my social media feeds, I invite you to answer this simple question: Which of these statements is not true?</p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify; "> Drinking from disposable paper cups lined with wax to keep the liquid from seeping leads to wax deposits in your stomach, resulting in fatal health risks.</li>
<li>Beverages in India have been contaminated by the Ebola virus and are on our shelves right now.</li>
<li>According to Ayurveda, burning camphor and cardamom together kills the swine flu virus in air.</li>
<li>Bollywood actor <a href="http://indianexpress.com/about/farida-jalal">Farida Jalal</a> is dead.</li>
</ol>
<p><iframe frameborder="0" height="260" scrolling="auto" src="http://vidshare.indianexpress.com/players/FrunroOr-xe0BVfqu.html" width="320"></iframe></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Of all of these, the only one you can verify is that Farida Jalal is not dead. The reason we know it for sure is because, she had to come to Twitter, and like Oscar Wilde, announce that the rumours of her death were wildly exaggerated. As Jalal herself pointed out in an interview, she was harassed by a barrage of phone calls, of people calling her up to ask her (oh, the irony!) if she was dead. The other three claims are right now floating in the air, ready to settle down as truth, with continuous repetition. We cannot be sure that they are inaccurate. Especially because they don’t just come as one-line headlines but long narratives of imaginary proofs.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Why have we reached this post-truth moment? Why have our social media feeds become minefields of dubious information masquerading as lies? There are many laments lately about how this lack of veracity and fact-checking is becoming the new normal and the blame is always put on either the media that promotes accelerated spread of messages without space for reflection, or gullible people who do not pause to think about the ludicrousness of the message before they spread it to their groups. And, while it is necessary to develop a critical literacy to make sure that we understand the responsibility of our role as information circulators and curators, there is one dimension that needs to be explored more — trust.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In our pre-digital knowledge practices, when information came with a signature, we believed that somebody had done the due diligence needed for the information to be published. An author’s book was supported by the rigour of the publisher behind it. A news report was fact-checked by verifiers who are employed precisely to do that. Information from a friend or somebody we know was credible because of our assessment of the person’s expertise and knowledge. We have always been able to determine the source of information, and our proximity with the source allowed us to trust the information that came through it.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, with social media, this relationship has changed. When somebody sends us a message on WhatsApp, it is still coming from a source that we know, but we have to realise that this source is not producing or verifying this information, but merely circulating it. Messages come with a signature, they seem to emerge from people we know and trust, and, hence, we presume that they have done the due diligence required before passing on the information.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It is important to realise that within the social web we don’t really parse, analyse or process information, we merely pass and distribute it. This is how digital media perceives its users — as information circulators. And, this means, that information which mimics facts but is blatantly false, finds easy prey. So, the next time you come across information on these endless message groups, ask a simple question before you pass it along: no matter what the message claims, can you actually locate the source of the information? Is the person who forwards that message producing the information or merely sharing it? If they are sharing it, get back to them and ask how they know what they know. We trust things that are authored, but in our social apps, people are not authors, they are circulators. Making the distinction between the two might be the first step towards developing a critical literacy for fact-telling on the digital web.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Nishant Shah is a professor of new media and the co-founder of The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore.</i></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-march-19-2017-digital-native-lie-me-a-river'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-march-19-2017-digital-native-lie-me-a-river</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at WorkRAW BlogDigital Natives2017-03-19T14:47:16ZBlog EntryDigital native: Let there be life
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-november-19-2017-nishant-shah-digital-native-let-there-be-life
<b>The first robot citizen of the world is from Saudi Arabia, and she has the dubious fame of having more rights than human counterparts in the country.
</b>
<p>The article was <a class="external-link" href="http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/digital-native-let-there-be-life-4942955/">published in Indian Express</a> on November 19, 2017.</p>
<hr />
<p> </p>
<p id="_mcePaste" style="text-align: justify; "><img alt="Saudi human robot, Sophia human robot first robot citizen" src="http://images.indianexpress.com/2017/11/sophie-human-robot-759.jpg" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span class="custom-caption" style="text-align: start; ">The publicity stunt that Saudi Arabia pulled with Sophia as the first robot citizen, however, does bring to the fore some more disconcerting points. (Image Source: Thinkstock)</span></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Last week, Saudi Arabia made Sophia — a humanoid robot with artificial intelligence and neural networked computation — an honorary citizen. Saudi Arabia, thus, becomes the first country to recognise that the boundaries of human life and technology have been blurring for quite a while. This is not unprecedented because in other countries personhood has been granted to many other non-human agencies. For example, companies like Google, across the globe, have exercised their rights to free speech and expression. In other parts of the world, conversations have emerged around environmental rights where rivers and forests were given human rights in order to save them from exploitation and erasure. In Japan, the committee for the regulation of artificial intelligence for social good, since 2016, has already forwarded the idea of companion robots who will become quasi members of society, and, how artificial intelligence will help these robots integrate into human lives. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Last week, Saudi Arabia made Sophia — a humanoid robot with artificial intelligence and neural networked computation — an honorary citizen. Saudi Arabia, thus, becomes the first country to recognise that the boundaries of human life and technology have been blurring for quite a while. This is not unprecedented because in other countries personhood has been granted to many other non-human agencies. For example, companies like Google, across the globe, have exercised their rights to free speech and expression. In other parts of the world, conversations have emerged around environmental rights where rivers and forests were given human rights in order to save them from exploitation and erasure. In Japan, the committee for the regulation of artificial intelligence for social good, since 2016, has already forwarded the idea of companion robots who will become quasi members of society, and, how artificial intelligence will help these robots integrate into human lives.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The publicity stunt that Saudi Arabia pulled with Sophia as the first robot citizen, however, does bring to the fore some more disconcerting points. While this well-calculated public relations gimmick might be positioned to put Saudi Arabia on the innovations map of the future, it does betray the fact that it now has the dubious fame of being a country where female-shaped robots have more rights than human women. In its press conference, Sophia appeared without the traditional headscarf, which is mandatory for all Saudi women to wear in public at all times. Sophia is allowed a voice, an agency and a sense of humour. It has been given the capacity and choice to talk to strangers and, in the future, the freedom to drive cars and stand up for its rights in a way that women in Saudi Arabia can’t.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sophia, with its humanoid futures rendered in silicon and fibres, also gets citizenship in a country where tens of thousands of immigrant workers — who live in conditions of slavish exploitation — are not allowed citizenship or even permanent residence. Saudi Arabia’s laws do not allow for citizenship by naturalisation. Sophia’s honorary citizenship is yet another signal of how the future of human rights and entitlements is going to be blurred when technological artefacts and artificial intelligences start competing for similar status.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, the most interesting part of Sophia’s new found personhood, is that Sophia, in fact, is not an individual entity. The robot might mimic human form and emotions, but, as a product of deep neural networking and machine learning, Sophia is extensively connected to multiple layers of computational data processing. There are super computers processing all its sensory input, algorithms that help it to navigate physical and social structures, distributed databases drawing from a language corpus that help it to formulate meaningful sentences; and, there are multiple artificial intelligence softwares that evolve and change Sophia’s behaviour through pattern recognition and deep learning.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sophia is not just a thing in isolation. It is a gateway robot that opens up a series of questions of what happens when we actually interact with and invite sapient technologies into our lives. Granting Sophia citizenship also includes granting citizenship to a server situated somewhere else in the world. In fact, if you establish a connection between Sophia and your machine, and manage to merge the two computing systems, your machine could easily make claims to be a part of the extended citizenship that has been granted to Sophia.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It is important to remember that even as our machines appear more human, more personalised, they are not just a single thing. As we develop new intimacies with our neural networked devices, it is good to take a step back and remember that the rights of humans might still be worth championing over the state of machines.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-november-19-2017-nishant-shah-digital-native-let-there-be-life'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-november-19-2017-nishant-shah-digital-native-let-there-be-life</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at Work2018-01-09T16:05:37ZBlog EntryDigital Native: Lessons from Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp going down
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-march-24-2019-digital-native-lessons-from-facebook-instagram-and-whatsapp-going-down
<b>The day when three social-media apps refused to load.</b>
<p>The article was published in <a class="external-link" href="https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/digital-native-turning-life-upside-down-5638488/">Indian Express</a> on March 24, 2019.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It was a day of chilly silence. I first registered something was wrong when the phone, that one true love, seemed to be giving me the silent treatment. The purple, blue and red lights that mark the notifications from three of my most-used apps — Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — were missing from my daily habits. When I tried to open and refresh the apps and nothing showed up, I confess I had a sense of foreboding.<br /><br />Three immediate scenarios came to my mind. I surreptitiously looked outside the window to see if I had missed the memo for the apocalypse while I was reading. However, because there were no zombie masses thronging the streets, I realised that the collapse of my information channels was not the end of the world. I also tried to see if the internet in the house had cracked, because surely, if Facebook wasn’t loading, the problem must be with my local service providers. But even as I looked around, all the Internet of Things devices at my home beeped, chirped, winked, and flashed merrily, reassuring that all was still the same. As a last resort, I tried reinstalling all the apps to see if my phone had gone bonkers but to no avail.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">That is when I decided to go to the “other” service that was still working — Twitter — and was delivered the digital reassurance that I was not alone. In fact, I was arriving to the party late because by then, all the thumb-click addicts, aghast at the loss of their platforms, had already flocked to Twitter getting their quick-fix of social media vagaries, and also complaining in horror at the biggest outage in internet history. The hashtags #facebookdown, #instagramdown, and #whatsappdown were already trending. Ironically, all the three companies were also using Twitter to update people about their engineering fixes, and also letting us know that this was just a “machine error” and not the cyberwarfare that we have been preparing for by downloading all our favourite shows on unconnected hard-drives stored in secure locations.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While this #downgate continued, it was a lot of fun to see people trolling their favourite platforms threatening to go back to MySpace and Orkut accounts (remember those?) while they wait for their lives to be restored. While the outage slowly became an inage (yes, I know that’s not a word, but it’s the internet, okay?) and we went back to the habits of the endless scroll, one question remained — what happens to the internet when we start giving up the ownership of all our information channels to a few megalithic corporations?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This question is particularly pertinent because just before #downgate, Facebook had already announced its intentions of clubbing all its messenger services together to achieve a seamless experience for its users. Seamlessness sounds like a great idea but it is also another word for assimilation. It is also another word that reminds us that the internet, once imagined as a disruptive force of independent voices and local collectives is obviously heading (if not already there) for a complete takeover by private companies.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We seem to be in the paradox where everyday we have a new app, offering new choices, new filters, new manipulations, and yet almost all of these apps are owned by the same companies. We have arrived at the moment of the “same same but different” where the plethora of choices is hiding the lack of creative freedoms on the web. The implications of these are not just about the boredom of our appified lives but about the politics of control. In closed information-architecture countries like China, we have already seen what a monopoly of digital data technologies can lead to — from social-credit-score systems to databases of “breed-worthy women”.<br /><br />It has been the fun (and the racially marked prerogative) of the global West to mock China and its curtailing of civil liberties and exercise of control. Most digital media outlets have encouraged this trend of setting up China as the laughing stock while the same happens to our global internet landscapes. Despite the continued reporting on data breaches, security overrides, and blatant exploitation of our digital practices, we continue to believe in the emancipatory potentials of the web, while turning a blind eye to the silent control of the technologies we use at the level of hardware, software, standards, protocols, code, and usage.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As we TikTok our ways into the rabbit hole of the endless stream of blink-and-miss viral content, it is easy to forget that behind the immense diversity of users creating this content is an increasingly monolithic technology infrastructure that can shut it all down at the whim and fancy of the next person who holds the switch.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-march-24-2019-digital-native-lessons-from-facebook-instagram-and-whatsapp-going-down'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-march-24-2019-digital-native-lessons-from-facebook-instagram-and-whatsapp-going-down</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at Work2019-04-03T01:19:29ZBlog EntryDigital Native: In digiville attention is Currency
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-june-11-2017-digital-native-in-digiville-attention-is-currency
<b>The increased importance on attention and the lack of it on social media gives all the more reason why we need to be discerning about what we invest our attention upon. </b>
<p>The article was <a class="external-link" href="http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-technology/digital-native-too-fast-too-furious-4697690/">published in the Indian Express</a> on June 11, 2017.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We’ve grown to the idea that the digital is dangerously fast. We are now used to instant delivery of services, immediate streaming of programmes, and having a coterie of people available to us at a click and a scroll. The globe has shrunk, the world has flattened, and we live on a planet that is essentially a giant super-computer enveloped in information and data streams. There is much to celebrate about the light-speed traffic of digital networks, where the gap between yesterday and tomorrow is so small, that there is no more today left to live in.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Our quickly accelerated lives get closer and closer to the science-fiction reality that our fantasies had once imagined. People get connected in ways they had never imagined, and our social and personal lives experience dramatic upheavals that might have filled lifetimes in other epochs. While these transformations are surrounding us, and the digital fulfils the promises it had kept, it is time to realise that not all is well in digiville. Because, sure, the digital circuits give us access to unprecedented information and give us a window into bedrooms far away from home, but they also lead to triggers that were never possible.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Last week, for instance, a large part of the world was frantically looking for the meaning of “covfefe”, after the Twitter-happy president of the USA decided that the world was ready for that word. Twitter went berserk, with conspiracy theories of what “covfefe” could mean, and the social web was exploding with much hilarity at the cost of the president. At the same time, the algorithms that govern the empires of Google Search, were being confounded by the fact that all the Indians, who have been quite prominent in their quest for digital porn, had suddenly changed their preferences and were really into “peacock sex”. Following the misguidedly strange proclamations of the judge from Rajasthan who desexualised the peacocks and cast a blemish on their records, hordes of people spent their time talking about the sex lives of peacocks.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Both of these incidents, moments of great levity and mirth, are symptomatic of the reactive space that the web has become. The hashtags trended. Memes were created. YouTube suddenly got flooded with peacock-mating videos — don’t just take my word for it, seriously, go and search for them! — and the tweets went viral. If we were to quantify the time that was spent globally and locally, reacting to what can only be seen as the ramblings of ignorant demagogues; while it does reflect the democratic potentials of the digital web, it also shows how trigger-happy we’ve become in our interaction with information.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the digital web, attention is currency. The more time, clicks, scrolls, likes and shares a digital object accrues, the more valuable it becomes. So much so, that completely insignificant items can thus assume dramatic proportions and people who have nothing more to offer than their ability to garner attention, can become celebrities. Incidentally, there is algorithmic science behind it. There is a reason why not all the rubbish that goes online becomes virally distributed. The human actors — the people who follow you — and the influence they create, form a small part of why some things get attention. The real influencers, in this case, are actually networked algorithms.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The network is not just a benign connection of nodes. It is a self-sustaining system that is designed for circulation. The network has its meaning and its lifeness only in its capacity to circulate data. The minute algorithms notice some information gathering interest, they start spreading it to even more avenues. As the information spreads and leaks into different spaces, more people like it — and the more people like it, the more it becomes subject to rapid circulation. This avalanche of attention that networks deposit on some information allows for these viral objects to emerge as significant, becoming time sinks where we all spend our time responding to them, without giving us a space of reflection or critical distance.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This same phenomenon creates uncivil, arrogant and boorish media personalities into celebrities. This is why fake news has become a naturalised phenomenon, where what is missing, is not our ability to discern between good and bad information, but the fact that most of this information comes with the endorsement of thousands of likes and millions of views, which gives it credibility even when it has no claims to truth. The rapid nature of our responsive digital lives needs to be questioned. While it is obvious that in the constantly updated data streams, momentary and micro engagements is the only survival mechanism that we have to cope with information overload, it is important that we check ourselves to make sure that the attention that we are spending is bestowed on objects and ideas that might be more worthy than peacocks having covfefes.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-june-11-2017-digital-native-in-digiville-attention-is-currency'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-june-11-2017-digital-native-in-digiville-attention-is-currency</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2017-07-05T16:40:52ZBlog EntryDigital Native: How smart cities can make criminals out of denizens
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-july-15-2018-nishant-shah-digital-native-the-citys-watching
<b>People download information and share it without knowing about the intellectual property rights. On social media bullying, harassment and hate speech find easy avenues.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article was published in <a class="external-link" href="https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/digital-native-the-citys-watching-5258165/">Indian Express</a> on July 15, 2018.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">I first heard about smart cities in 2003. Sitting in India, it seemed to be a very strange concept being developed in the Netherlands, where the planners were trying to arm an entire city with smartness. The idea was that if we deploy enough cameras, devices that see, machines that hear, and data connectivity that envelopes the city in a seamless cloud, it might lead to more order, discipline, and control. To me that felt like a strange experiment because under all of those different imaginations of the city as a neat, organised, controlled environment, were assumptions that were alien to my Indian sensibilities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It was strange to look at all the promises that “smartness” would deliver — it would make human life easier. It would increase safety and create order out of chaos. It would build new lifestyles that are filled with assistive technologies. In all of these, was the imagination of the city as a laboratory — controlled and efficient, as opposed to riotous and serendipitous. The cities were positioned as filled with intention, so that the interruptions of people, animals, festivals, traffic and crowds would be removed through the deployment of these digital devices and networks. What needed to be preserved was the city and its infrastructure, rather than the individuals and communities that make the city alive and exciting. We wanted our infrastructure to be smart, taking decisions on our behalf, and shaping our lives through the algorithmic protocols that they were coded to embody.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In that faraway time, these had felt like idle speculations. Fifteen years on, I have now come to realise that the biggest motivation for building smart cities was not really facilitating human movement, habitation and habits. Indeed, at the heart of the smart city project was the setting up of a massive surveillance apparatus that would clinically diagnose the unwanted people and processes in the city, and surgically remove them — with the assistance of predictive technologies that would be implemented in policing and planning these city spaces.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Smart cities were not constructed to make people’s lives easier. They were constructed because, increasingly, all the people in a city are imagined as “users”, who need to be instructed through terms of services, how they must behave and live in these city spaces. One of the biggest cultural turns in the massification of the digital web was that almost all users were imagined as potential criminals by the very virtue of them being connected. Internet service providers and regulators knew that if people are connected, they will be violating the law at some point or another, sometimes unknowingly. People download information and share it without knowing about the intellectual property rights. On social media bullying, harassment and hate speech find easy avenues. The largest traffic on the internet is for pornographic and often banned material which finds its audiences on the connected web. Spammers, viruses, hijacked machines, and, often, searches for unexpected items lead people onto the dark web where the questionable human interactions happen frequently.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The introduction of the digital terms of services was essentially to presume that the user was a potential criminal who leases hardware and software, and, platforms from proprietary companies and governments could then control and discipline the user through comprehensive surveillance practices. Construction of smart cities performs a similar function in the physical space. Instead of thinking about citizens as co-owners who shape city spaces, smart cities establish a service level agreement with its occupants, and reduces them to users. Any deviation results in punitive action or devaluation, often curbing the movement, and the rights of belonging to the city spaces.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While it is true that smart technologies can facilitate certain aspects of human life, they depend on unfettered data collection, predictive profiling, correlative algorithms and conditions of extreme invasion and control — which are all predicated on the idea that you will falter. And when you do, the technologies will be there to witness, record, archive, and punish you for the daily transgressions till you are wiped into becoming a predictable, controlled, cleaned up drone that travels in docility across the networked edges of the city. We will be assimilated. Resistance will be futile.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-july-15-2018-nishant-shah-digital-native-the-citys-watching'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-july-15-2018-nishant-shah-digital-native-the-citys-watching</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at WorkInternet GovernanceDigital Natives2018-08-01T00:19:23ZBlog EntryDigital Native: How free is the internet?
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-august-18-2019-digital-native-how-free-is-internet
<b>It is contradictory and confusing as it amplifies as well as destabilises the order of things.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article by Nishant Shah was <a class="external-link" href="https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/digital-native-how-free-is-the-internet-5907436/">published in Indian Express</a> on August 18, 2019.</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">With the Internet came freedom. Freedom to converse, curate, collect, create, and circulate. The freedom to be, think, act, and connect is the promise of democratisation of the Internet. It enables people across traditional silos to reach over and form new bonds of belonging and coming together. It challenges the vanguards of knowledge by curating information from multiple sources, challenging the status quo with new critical voices. It destabilises the erstwhile centres of information and knowledge production and kickstarts a zeitgeist of user-generated content. It builds an architecture that makes everybody their own personal archivist, chronicling lives in minutiae that would otherwise have been lost. It makes us not just mobile-wielding people, but mobile people, finding an ease of movement that was unknown to older generations.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The freedom to be who we are, to do what we will, and to form commons of collective action and agency marks the internet age. And yet, this freedom is paradoxical. Even as it crosses boundaries, it creates new borders through granular filter bubbles that reinforce our dogmatism. While it challenges the status quo, it also gives way to polarised expressions of hate and violence resulting in digital troll armies and physical lynchmobs. The freedom to choose what we collect and who we speak to increases individual choices while compromising collective civil liberties at the behest of authoritarian governments and surveilling corporations. We write our new histories while also revising the old ones to disarticulate protections afforded to the most vulnerable of our communities. The internet, it would seem, is contrary, contradictory, and confusing as it simultaneously amplifies and destabilises the order of things.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This contradictory nature of the internet easily lends itself to politics of despair, questioning the value and worth of internet freedom if its harms seem to outstrip the affordances it offers. Once you see people on Twitter asking for their food delivery persons to be changed because they come from a different religion, you have to think fondly of the times when people’s bigotry was limited to their living rooms. The mindless flurry of good-morning messages and misogynist jingoism that marks our WhatsApp groups make us seriously question if unmediated information flow is actually worth it. Every instance of targeted advertisement, manipulative content, and misinformation that comes our way through correlating algorithms force us to evaluate the value of user-generated content. A couple of hours on Instagram and Snapchat and looking at people performing their lives as flattened fakeness on scrolling screens gives us existential thoughts about whether all these friends, followers, likes, and hearts are worth the trouble they seem to be putting people into. A look on the dark side and it is easy to be convinced that Internet Freedoms need to be controlled, regulated, and clamped down upon.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">These are questions that can inform policies, shape user behaviour, and control the regulation of information towards censorial, closed, and opaque information systems. This is dangerous because all of these questions are about the “freedom to” promises of the internet. They focus on actions, transactions, reactions, and exactions of our digital behaviour. However, in censoring and regulating these “freedoms to” we often end up cracking down on “freedoms of”. We have to remember that the despair of the “freedoms to” are about the human capacity to abuse the freedoms given to us. Whereas the “freedoms of” are the abstract but material freedoms of speech, expression, self-determination, dignity and life, and if we don’t distinguish the two, we would compromise our fundamental rights in the quest of curtailing specific actions.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We need to recognise these “freedoms of” as fundamental freedoms without which the very conception of contemporary human life is difficult. Concentrating only on the “freedom to” allows for suspensions of our basic rights: an intermediary removing and censoring information without due process, bloggers getting arrested for political protests, civil society organisations trolled and silenced, individual information leaked, big data sets sold without consent, and direct attacks on those who critique the status quo. Internet’s “freedom of” is not just about regulating technology and penalising human behaviour but about the foundational rights and liberties we protect and champion as humans. If the dark side of the abuse of “freedom to” gives us despair, the optimistic imagination invested in the “freedom of” gives us hope. I am not going to facetiously declare that Internet Freedoms are Human Freedoms, because it is too trite an equivalence. But, an authoritarian control of Internet Freedom to action can severely compromise our rights to being free, and human.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-august-18-2019-digital-native-how-free-is-internet'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-august-18-2019-digital-native-how-free-is-internet</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at Work2019-09-04T01:47:03ZBlog EntryDigital Native: How an information overload affects what you forward
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-march-10-2019-indian-express-digital-native-how-an-information-overload-affects-what-you-forward
<b>The information overload of social media sharing can make us act against our better judgement.</b>
<p>The article was published in <a class="external-link" href="https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/digital-native-monsters-unchained-5615666/">Indian Express</a> on March 10, 2019.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">I had to do a double take when the post flashed on my feed. It was a post filled with armchair bloodlust, calling for war and justifying it through emotional bulls***. In many ways, it wasn’t shocking, because in its misdirected anger and emotional patriotism, it mimicked the charged nature of conversations that we have naturalised on the social web. It also followed the familiar paths of writing about action — from the safety and comfort of a sheltered life, where it is clear that the people sharing it would never have to participate in the war that they are baying for, and that even the destructive aftermath of the war would not interrupt their latte lifestyles.<br /><br />It was clearly authored by one of those social media savants who indulge in random acts of capitalisation, which give you a brain rash. It did not even claim to be factual — the excesses of exclamation points were supposed to make up both for the hate speech and xenophobia that were being couched as nationalism.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This time, though, the post came from an unexpected source. It was shared in a group that generally has rational, fairly academics and measured discussions about the politics of everyday life. In the past, the most offensive thing anybody had done in a disagreement was to make threatening cat memes. And yet, here was a post that had the community howling for violence and fighting among each other with a vitriol that they would have generally decried and derided.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Unable to understand this completely unexpected behaviour, I started pinging a few familiar people through private messages, asking them why they were deviating into uncharacteristic behaviour. In a dozen different conversations, one thing that everybody talked about was how they did not begin with this emotional state when they heard the first susurrations of war. They all shared that their first reaction to the portents of war was cautious concern and a thoughtful contemplation of its consequences. However, somewhere between that first reaction and now, something obviously had switched. They had gone from people wanting to think about the possibilities of war to mobs who were supporting rabid and radical calls for action not grounded in anything more than an emotional excess.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Their emotional state, they were saying, was not their own, but was something they learned as they were bombarded with incessant torrents of similar posts that valorised, championed and positioned war as the only option available. At some time in their information overload, facts, truths, thoughtfulness and critique all disappeared and they got sucked into a viral sharing habit where they inherited the anger, the hate, and the militarised trolling that flooded their timelines.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">When we talk of information overload and the constant engagement with social media streams, we often talk about people doing strange things, which they would not do in real life — if there is a real life that can be separated from the digital domains. Especially when looking at gender-based violence, non-consensual distribution of sexual content, and cyber-bullying, the perpetrators often find themselves in a state of shock when confronted personally with their actions and their consequences. Many people, swept in the fashions of the digital delirium, begin their confessions in a state of denial: “This is not who I am… I just lost control”, is a common refrain.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Researchers have pointed out that one of the most dramatic effects of information saturation is the suspension of emotional guards and affective patterns. Information overload sometimes leaves the subject in an emotional state that resembles victims of mental abuse. It leads to such a state of stress and tension that many people just give in to the onslaught of information and follow the patterns rather than resisting or questioning it. Continued sharing and circulation makes our emotional judgement fickle, and we often act against our impulses.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Algorithms of manipulation, coordinated bot attacks, and commissioned troll campaigns exploit this, because this emotional state is one that can be easily controlled — towards making political choices, buying things we don’t want, towards attacking people, communities, countries. It is time to realise that our sharing is not just about our own impulses and ideas. We are continuously being nudged and taught to inherit an emotional state that is being engineered in the circuits of the social web. So the next time you share something, pause, and think about whether this is what you want to say or this is what you are being trained to say, because what we say and share has consequences, often beyond that quick click.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-march-10-2019-indian-express-digital-native-how-an-information-overload-affects-what-you-forward'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-march-10-2019-indian-express-digital-native-how-an-information-overload-affects-what-you-forward</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at Work2019-04-03T01:12:30ZBlog EntryDigital Native: Hashtag Fatigue
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-october-28-2018-digital-native-hashtag-fatigue
<b>It is easy to hijack hashtags by coupling them with others. It is equally easy to make hashtags die.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article was <a class="external-link" href="https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/digital-native-hashtag-fatigue-5419341/">published in Indian Express</a> on October 28, 2018.</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Information overload is our new default. We don’t just slip into a condition of overload, we live in it on a daily basis. Every minute, surrounded by digital devices that buzz, beep, chirp, blink and notify us about the various information streams that shape us, we experience a sensory overload that is unprecedented. One of the reasons for this information overload is that digital networks work on traffic. Traffic — the data that travels in bits, bytes, and packets, over the network edges of our computation systems — is the lifeline of a network. A network without traffic is dead. The network exists to circulate information and transfer information. Take that away and the network is just a whole lot of dead hardware.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">So, if a computational network is our default mode of existence, then we will have to accept that these networks will continue to incessantly circulate traffic and keep the edges that connect us as nodes, busy, with a continued information stream. This is why our machines are in a state of continued update, and this is why we expect to receive and share new information in all states.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This state of information overload has led to some alarming signals about human relationship with information: We find our attention now shallow, because even before we have processed the first stream of information, something else comes and dislocates that information. Information intensity is replaced by information scale, so we are no longer invested in a deep engagement with the information that comes to us. For information to keep our attention longer than the click, we need information to be repeated, consolidated, and updated over and over again, so that we can keep focusing on the same topic, but on multiple screens and interfaces.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The hashtag is a great example of this. Even though a hashtag excites us, inspires us, and motivates us to engage with an information stream, hashtags immediately dislocate us to other hashtags and other tangents. It is easy to hijack hashtags by coupling them with others. It is equally easy to make hashtags die by infusing them with misinformation which makes the user disengage from the stream. Hashtags can make things go viral, by being shared, and they can hold attention only if they are fed by multiple and many voices that keep them alive.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While viral hashtags have public attention and hold, they also lead to a different phenomenon — what I call #hashtag fatigue. We get bored of the hashtag, because the same few ones show up so many times, that even when they have new material, we presume that we already know what accompanies them. We also get tired of the hashtags, because they fill up almost all our attention span. We get desensitised, often ignoring the individual and collective experiences they consolidate. We learn to ignore hashtags, because as more people share it, the more it seems to be everyday, losing easily to other information sets that are screaming for eyeballs.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We see this in the way #<a href="https://indianexpress.com/about/me-too-movement/">MeToo</a> is developing in India. As more women come out, naming their abusers and enablers, we see a hashtag fatigue stepping in. We already see people raising an emoji eyebrow and rolling their digital eyes while there are abusers who are maintaining silence hoping that this will phase out soon. There are people who have started making jokes about how everything is now #MeToo, and this also feeds into the patriarchal powers who are using this moment to paint themselves as victims of vindictive women, dismissing their collective and individual trauma. We see many survivors getting overwhelmed by the scale of voices trickling in, feeling deafened by the continuous traffic that surrounds the hashtag, but also creating an isolated island where nothing else trickles in. We see news media already finding either new angles or other controversies, because in the lifeline of the news cycle, this is already old news.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In order for #MeToo to remain a sustainable social justice movement and a long-standing solidarity, we will have to find other ways of engaging with this movement. While the digital offers the first platform and catalysis, we will have to find other spaces for the movement and its ambitions to survive. It is time for us to simultaneously find forms that will capture the urgency but move beyond the viral fatigue of the #hashtag.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-october-28-2018-digital-native-hashtag-fatigue'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-october-28-2018-digital-native-hashtag-fatigue</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at Work2018-11-01T06:04:25ZBlog EntryDigital Native: Hashtag Along With Me
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-native-hashtag-along-with-me
<b>A hashtag that evolved with a movement.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article was published in <a class="external-link" href="https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/digital-native-hashtag-along-me-5279453/">Indian Express</a> on July 29, 2018.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Hashtags generally come with shelf lives and expiry dates. They come to life in a moment of public excitement and then slowly peter out as the attention shifts to something else. Even the most viral hashtags, which contain all the visceral power of explosive emotion, quickly get replaced by the next big thing. Hashtags have been critiqued as inefficient tools for activism. Because they absorb so much energy and attention, only to fade.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While it is true that in the rapidly overloaded information cycles of social media, hashtags might disappear in due time, maybe we need to think of their disappearance as hibernation rather than forgetting, being archived to memory rather than being lost to recall. Perhaps, it is not yet time to wash our hands of hashtag-based activism, because they do not stay in continued attention. Maybe, it is possible that even when hashtags might not be trending and garnering eyeballs, in their very presence and emergence, they transform something and catalyse actions that take incubation cycles longer than the accelerated digitalisation allows for.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Recently, this reminder came when I saw #NotGoingBack trending on Twitter. In 2013, when the Supreme Court of India overturned the Delhi High Court’s judgment reading down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, it was a moment of despair for human rights and queer communities that fight for their right to life and love. The judgment reinforced shame, persecution and pain that the queer community in India faced because of an arcane law that punished consenting same-sex love.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In that moment of despair, fighting against the oppression by law and in validation of #queerlivesmatter, a hashtag was born: #NotGoingBack. The hashtag referred both to the metaphorical closet that this judgement would force queer people back into, and also to a political determination of not accepting this verdict — of not going back on our commitments to build diverse, inclusive, and safe societies for all our people. #NotGoingBack captured the narratives of despair, but also the collective resolve to continue fighting for a nation that is for everyone, in 2013.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Since then, it has resurfaced at different points during moments of hope — like the NALSA judgement that legalised the rights of trans-gender people to be identified as the third gender, or, in moments of pain — when we heard of queer people killing themselves, unable to bear the social stigma of being criminalised for their right to love. The hashtag has continued to come up, when legal fights to protect queer rights and lives have proceeded, or when attention had to be drawn to the inhumane reports of murder, torture, rape and imprisonment that followed.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In July 2018, when the new bench constituted by the Supreme Court agreed to question the re-criminalisation verdict, and started hearings about the constitutional validity of this judgment, the hashtag returned in full force — and unlike the other times, it was also suffused with love, hope, and solidarity of a large community of queer, queer-allied, and queer-friendly people who supported this revision. It has been extraordinary to see how public support has changed in the five years since the hashtag made its first appearance. More and more people have realised that while this is a question of queer rights, it is also a question of human rights, and how we live and love. The 2013 verdict suggested that the people were not ready to accept queer lives. The 2018 bench has clearly opined that the role of the court is to protect the people based on constitutional rights, not to pander to populism.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">And yet, what has been inspiring is that the popular response to decriminalisation has been overwhelmingly positive. To the extent that even the conservative government at the centre has indicated that it will not challenge the wisdom of the court if it decides to read down Section 377. As we await the final judgment that promises to be historic and hopeful, we cannot deny the indefatigable commitment, movement and protest that the lawyers, activists, and queer community leaders have invested in making this happen. At the same time, it is also a good indicator of how hashtags live, morph, and re-emerge across longer timelines. We need to start recognising them not only in their fruit-fly like presence but as catalysts for longer movements.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-native-hashtag-along-with-me'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-native-hashtag-along-with-me</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at WorkInternet GovernanceDigital Natives2018-08-01T00:25:04ZBlog EntryDigital Native: Hardly Friends Like That
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-september-30-2018-digital-native-hardly-friends-like-that
<b>Individual effort is far from enough to fool Facebook’s grouping algorithm.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article was published in the <a class="external-link" href="https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/digital-native-hardly-friends-like-that-5378199/">Indian Express</a> on September 30, 2018</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Lately, my <a href="https://indianexpress.com/about/facebook/">Facebook</a> timeline is flooded with people who are trying to “hack” Facebook’s friendship algorithm. Ever since Facebook took away the option from its users, to view their posts in reverse chronology, and made us slaves to its algorithms that pick and choose, based on opaque rules, what we see on our timeline, people have been frustrated with it. When your newsfeed is compiled by an algorithm that selects and decides what is good for you to see and what will be your interest, it doesn’t just mean that you have lost control, but that you are being manipulated without even noticing it, responding to only certain kinds of information that triggers specific responses from you.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This has led to a lot of people trying to “fool” the Facebook algorithm and taking their agency back. One of the most popular version of this is a meme that announces that Facebook algorithms only show us particular kinds of information from a certain kind of people, thus creating an echo chamber where all we do is see pictures of cute cats, dancing babies and holidays. The post suggests that if we all just talk to each other more, then we will have meaningful conversations — like, you know, about dancing cats, cute babies and where we wish to go on a holiday.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It is true that based on the nature of interaction, Facebook seems to designate some connections as strong connections. So, if we are chatting on Messenger, liking each others’s posts a lot, have many friends in common, are tagged together in the same pictures, Facebook makes a logical deduction that we have a lot in common in real life, and that we would be interested in each other more than other low-traffic connections. The meme asks people to leave a message on the post, start a conversation, and with this clever ploy, upset the Facebook algorithm. Now that we have chatted once, it suggests, Facebook is going to think we are the best of friends and is going to show us more diverse sources on the timeline.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><ins></ins></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This meme, and many like it, are attempts at taking agency in how we curate and consume our social media. Both of them are romantic, human, and absolutely flawed. They seem to think that Facebook’s algorithms follow human logic, and that they work on simple principles which we can counteract with simple actions. What they fail to take into account is that in the world of big data connections, Facebook’s algorithms draw their causal and correlative powers from more than a 100 data points which create a unique profile for each of its users. They fail to recognise that this message of resistance is still subject to the same principles of “traffic generating capacity”, and will be showed more often only for a temporary period until people stop interacting on that thread. With time and waning interest, it will die and people will be distracted by other information. They also don’t recognise that Facebook is still going to show your post largely to the same people that it has been showing your pictures to, and even if new people show engagement with it, it is not going to radically change your timeline.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While these posts are fun conversation starters, they cannot possibly be taken seriously. If Facebook’s algorithms were this easy to fool, every advertiser worth their salt would be busy manipulating the stream without spending any money on the platform. More importantly, individual actions are not going to circumvent the automation of our digital collective behaviour. To pretend that there is scope for such actions in the age of extreme customisation and profiling is a fool’s paradise. It also deflects our attention from the fact that if these are critical concerns, the responsibility of changing these conditions is not on the users but on companies like Facebooks and the governments that have to hold them accountable.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">You and I, with all our good intentions, are not going to be able to “hack” Facebook’s algorithms or “fool” them into giving us results that we want. The only thing that can produce this change is strong regulation, robust policy, and taking the social media behemoth to task about how it addresses the questions of human agency and choice. So, the next time you want to produce real change, join the campaigns and ask our government to do something so that we can control our social media life.</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-september-30-2018-digital-native-hardly-friends-like-that'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-september-30-2018-digital-native-hardly-friends-like-that</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2018-10-02T06:28:10ZBlog EntryDigital Native: Getting through an election made for the social media gaze
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-april-21-2019-nishant-shah-getting-through-an-election-made-for-social-media-gaze
<b>In the poll season, social media platforms thrive on wounded outrage disguised as politics.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article by Nishant Shah was <a class="external-link" href="https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/digital-native-the-gaze-5682831/">published in Indian Express</a> on April 21, 2019.</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There is palpable excitement as the most populous democracy in the world goes out to vote. Last election, which saw the saffron sweep, we realised the role of social media platforms in electoral politics. From the controversial selfie by the aspiring Prime Minister flaunting the lotus symbol, that was reported as violating the advertisement rules set by the Election Commission, to the mass mobilisation of ideology-based voters, orchestrated by automated bots and the hashtag brigades of #acchedin, there was no denying that digital strategies are going to form the backend of a robust political campaign.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><aside class="o-story-content__related--large o-story-content__related">I<span>n a country of hypervisible lynch mobs staged via WhatsApp, polarised hatred exacerbated by armies of trolls, and the fluency with which hate speech has been normalised on the tweetosphere, social media and digital apps are front and centre in this election. People are coming out of voting booths and, even before the exit pollsters catch them, they are making Snapchat videos and “I voted” selfies, clearly identifying the parties they support. The verified social media accounts of leading political parties are doubling down on their poll promises of a communal purge of “infiltrators”, divine curses for the heretic who doesn’t vote for the “party of gods”, and threats of profiling if a community voted for the correct party and subsequent dire consequences. The door-to-door campaigning of the past has obviously been replaced by the tweet-to-tweet mixture of threats, cajoling, and blood lust that seems to set the tone for our current political climate.</span></aside></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">At the same time, the manifestos of the two leading coalitions, as well as the affidavits of the people running for office, are under deep public scrutiny. The <a href="https://indianexpress.com/about/bjp/">BJP</a>, in a Freudian blooper, announced itself as working for violence on women, incurring the sarcastic wrath of Twitter. One minister, who has been running through various cabinet positions, including education, was called to task to explain her wide repertoire of unverified degrees that change every voting season. Complaints against suspicious Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) have made themselves heard loudly on social-media discussion forums. And lately, the YouTube videos of people allegedly showing the easy removal of the indelible ink from the voting fingers, exploded into public view, jeopardising the integrity of the one-person-one-vote paradigm.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Social media, it would seem, is everywhere. And its ubiquity is ensuring that all stakeholders of the electoral process are performing for the social media gaze. Our leaders are talking in tweet-sized morsels, hoping to get their last messages in. The organisers of the massive process have taken to debunking false claims, providing verified information, and guiding people to their voting processes. The voters are not only wearing their party colours, but also canvassing for their favourite leaders, either through proclamations of patriotism or through emotional messages of voting against hate and discrimination. Voting groups are scrutinising and discussing the party manifestos and also the unexpected alliances coming into being in the quest of reaching the majority mark.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-april-21-2019-nishant-shah-getting-through-an-election-made-for-social-media-gaze'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-april-21-2019-nishant-shah-getting-through-an-election-made-for-social-media-gaze</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at WorkDigital ActivismDigital IndiaDigital Natives2019-04-28T04:12:45ZBlog EntryDigital native: Free speech? You must be joking!
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-may-14-2017-digital-native-free-speech-you-must-be-joking
<b>India’s digital landscape is dotted with vigilante voices that drown out people’s right to free speech.</b>
<p>The article was published in the <b><a class="external-link" href="http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-technology/digital-native-free-speech-you-must-be-joking-4655464/">Indian Express</a></b> on May 14, 2017.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Freedom of speech and expression has always been a tricky issue. While all of us are generally in favour of defending our rights to speak what is in our hearts, we are not equally thrilled about the speech of others that we might not enjoy. While we know that free speech and expression are not absolute — there are blurred lines of things that are offensive, might cause harm, and are directed with malice at different individuals or collectives — we also generally accept that this is a freedom that marks the maturity and sustainability of a stable democratic system.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Thus, even when confronted with speech and expression that might be undesirable: a political view that contradicts ours, an expression of blasphemy or profanity, a voice of dissent that questions the status quo, or an unsavoury information tidbit that mocks at somebody we admire, we generally take it in good stride, and learn to deal and engage with these actions. We do this, because we know that trying to curtail somebody else’s rights to free speech, would eventually restrict our own capacity for it, thus reducing the scope of an engaged and critical society. Especially in countries like India, where everybody has an opinion, where people offer critiques over chai and join heated debates over paan, there’s no denying that we are fond of our rights and capacity to speak<br /> our minds.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, within Digital India, these things seem to be changing fast. Every day we wake up to the cacophonous clamour of social media to realise that increasingly we are becoming an intolerant society filled with vigilantes bent on stopping people from saying things that we might just not like. In the ongoing saga of shrinking spaces of free speech, we now add the shameful incident at the Embassy of Sweden in India. On May 8, following mass populist trolling and complaints from the Twitteratti, the Embassy disinvited two women print and TV journalists — Swati Chaturvedi and Barkha Dutt — and cancelled their event, ironically, in the honour of World Press Freedom, on the topic of women’s participation in the online public space, to talk about trolls.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">I shall wait here for the bitter irony to sink in: two of the strongest women voices in Indian public media, were disinvited to speak from an event where they were to talk about their experience of being trolled, harassed, bullied and intimidated in the newly emerging digital media landscape. Instead of giving them a voice, sharing their experiences, and engaging with their stories, the hypermasculine army of right wing vigilantes who object to these women’s history of critique of the current government and its leaders, decided to show their Twitter might, and celebrated as they succeeded in putting one more nail in the coffin of free and fearless speech in the country.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Some Twitter users went ahead and tagged their favourite leaders — @Narendramodi and @manekagandhibjp. They demanded, using their freedom of voice, to stop others from speaking. Social media networks have often been celebrated as alternative spaces where new, and unexpected voices can express their opinions without the fear of physical retribution or penalisation. While this has been consistently proven wrong by government authorities who have regularly policed, penalised and punished voices of dissent or disfavour, that at least is something we can notice, challenge and contest through legal redressal. However, with this new mob justice where the volume of voices engineered to amplify their disapproval, coupled with threats of violence and economic downfall (the users this time threatened to make a list of Swedish products and boycott them) is a recurring and disturbingly new phenomenon.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Crowds have always had the power to demand and leverage change of their liking. However, on social media, this can take up more sinister forms, because a handful of people through Twitter bots and chat scripts can create the illusion of a hugely amplified voice that can then be used to threaten and restrict the scope of free speech. The mass bullying effect needs a strong counterpoint in the form of better internet governance policies and regulations that nurture safe spaces for the tinier voices to be heard.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">At the same time, however, the stifling attempts require another strategy — the need to speak up against such acts of intimidation and silencing, not only from the regular people on the web, but from the officials and leaders who have sworn to protect our constitutional rights. And this is, perhaps, where our leaders are failing us. Because, in an age of hypervisibility, where every step they take is a selfie moment, where every move they make makes it to the headlines, and they take pride in documenting their life in exceedingly boring detail, it creates a deafening silence when the leaders remain mute to the slow dissipation of the rights to free speech and expression by the angry mobs of networked digitality.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-may-14-2017-digital-native-free-speech-you-must-be-joking'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-may-14-2017-digital-native-free-speech-you-must-be-joking</a>
</p>
No publishernishantFreedom of Speech and ExpressionResearchers at WorkDigital India2017-06-08T01:16:01ZBlog EntryDigital Native: Finger on the buzzer
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-october-22-2017-digital-native-finger-on-the-buzzer
<b>Which Hogwarts House are you? No, you don’t really want to know.
</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>The article was </span><a class="external-link" href="http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/digital-native-finger-on-the-buzzer/">published in Indian Express</a><span> on October 22, 2017.</span></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; "><br />Internet browsing histories are dangerous things. One of the reasons why I would not want mine made public is because it will expose the part of my surfing that I am the most ashamed of — click-bait quizzes. No matter how frivolous the quiz might be, I can’t resist taking it. From which Hogwarts House I belong to (Hufflepuff all the way) to which Hollywood celebrity I look like (the last result was Matt Damon! Go figure); from how many books I can name by their first lines (92 on a score of 100) to how many words I can spell correctly (always a 100 per cent). While I know that most of these are completely pointless and a huge distraction from watching videos of hamsters eating carrots and goats butting people, I am a complete sucker for these quizzes. I even have an entire anonymous social media account just to take and share these endless no-sense time-sinks that populate the social web.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Recently, while succumbing to the late-night temptation of answering questions on one of these “tests” that challenged me to identify the correct spelling of the most commonly misspelled words, I erred. I am embarrassed (that was one of the word) that I am always a little confused when it comes to the word “accommodate” — I can never remember if the number of “c”s and “m”s are the same in the spelling and I made the wrong choice. I knew it, in a split second after choosing the option, that I was wrong. However, like the boy scout that I am, I decided to just continue with the test rather than re-doing it, and be content with a less than perfect score.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">So imagine my surprise, when I got the final results. The test declared I was the next of kin to Shakespeare (which is weird, because he was such an atrocious speller) and that I had a 100 per cent accurate result. The analysis sang paeans (see, I can spell that without a spell-checker!) to my prowess at spelling and how, when it comes to the English language, I am nothing short of a savant. But I knew I had made a mistake, and so I decided to take the test again. This time, I deliberately made more than one mistake, carefully choosing wrong spellings for different words. Lo and behold, my final analysis still announced me as the peer of Shashi Tharoor, with the capacity to confound the Tweetosphere with my verbiage.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The pronouncements of my spelling skills had nothing to do with my ability. No matter how many times you took the quiz — with varying degrees of error — like a doting mother, it insisted that you are the best. Quizzes like these, which pretend to test and give an insight into our own capacities, are the new click bait. These quizzes have nothing to do with content or our skills. They have a simple function: they want us to feel validated so that we share the results as a humble brag with others in our social networks, catalysing an avalanche of people who would perpetuate the cycle. In this indiscreet sharing, these quizzes collect valuable data without our consent.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It is impossible to take such quizzes without signing in through our existing social media accounts and giving access to data that we would otherwise never think of giving to complete strangers promising to tell us our fake futures. These quizzes have identified that the biggest currency of the digital web is personal data, which, then, gets collected, collated, correlated and circulated to other actors who capitalise on it. This is the promise and threat of the big data industries that we live in. I do not want to add to the fear-mongering that often surrounds data theft — if data is the currency, then it is obvious that we are going to have to trade it, guard it, and save it, just the way we do our other currencies.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">What I do want to point out is, that if there was a quiz, an app, a programme or a device, which asked to access our bank accounts in order to tell us that we are geniuses, we would be very suspicious of them. Remember, we are still hesitant to even giving our credit card details to websites (you know the premium platforms I am talking about) that have questionable content. We do not easily part with our passwords and keys to Artificial Intelligence scripts masquerading as fake prophets. Similarly, we need to give equal attention to the personal data sets that we give away to seemingly harmless things like quizzes and apps. Indeed, it is fun to indulge in this world of self-congratulatory feedback loops, but it is also good to pay some thought to the cost of this fun. Because when it comes to the world of data driven digitality, the axiom is really simple: if you are having fun for free, you are paying in ways that you cannot see. Often, it is through your personal data and private information.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-october-22-2017-digital-native-finger-on-the-buzzer'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-october-22-2017-digital-native-finger-on-the-buzzer</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at Work2018-01-10T00:38:24ZBlog EntryDigital native: Ever on the go
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-july-30-2017-digital-native-ever-on-the-go-digital-india-mobility
<b>It is time to insist that the infrastructure of digital India is accompanied by the infrastructure of care for the digital Indian.When the telephone was first introduced as a mass communication tool, one of the biggest fears was that it would allow people to lie and cheat at will.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article was published in the <a class="external-link" href="http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/social/digital-native-ever-on-the-go-digital-india-mobility/">Indian Express</a> on July 30, 2017.</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It is time to insist that the infrastructure of digital India is accompanied by the infrastructure of care for the digital Indian.When the telephone was first introduced as a mass communication tool, one of the biggest fears was that it would allow people to lie and cheat at will.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The social fabric of existence till then, was built on the idea that communication happens between two people who are in close proximity of each other, and thus, are careful of what they say, because there can be immediate consequences to their words. Editorials were written and codes were established trying to figure out how we will deal with this increased distance. When mobile phones came into the market, these fears were intensified. Because, the telephone, at least, had the individual tied to a location and fixed in a particular context. Whereas the mobile phone meant that you could be anywhere and lie about it.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In her hilarious book on modern day etiquette, Talk to the Hand, Lynn Truss describes how she spent hours in public spaces eavesdropping on people, hoping to catch them in the middle of spectacular lying. She was disappointed when people on the train, when called by their partners and bosses, honestly confessed that they were, indeed, aboard a train. In the hours spent lurking in public spaces, never once did she uncover a juicy story of somebody sitting in a park and trying to convince somebody else that they were in the middle of work on a hectic day. Disappointed as she was by the lack of imagination shown by her fellow human beings, Truss does remind us that this new condition of being mobile because we have a mobile phone is one of the most liberating moments of digital telecommunications. And, largely, it is true — our everyday communication now no longer takes for granted that we could know where people are when we are talking to them. Ubiquitous mobile coverage and ever-ready connections mean that we could be interrupting people in their most intimate moments — of making love or doing the morning needful in the loo, or, we could be reaching out to them in moments of such extreme boredom, that they have started tweeting back at celebrities in the hope of making a human connection.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This mobility has been celebrated as a part of our digital make up. Especially with high speed mobile data and almost a seamless access to the web, we now seem to think of this distributed and fragmented nature of our being as the new real. Conversations on apps like WhatsApp continue across spaces and time zones almost seamlessly. Our physical and contextual locations change rapidly even in the course of just one Twitter war. With streaming services like Netflix offering multi-device access to our favourite shows, binge watching is not just limited to the favourite couch at home. A series that starts on the laptop at home, might continue on the phone as we walk down to the cab or train, and then shift to the tablet as we switch from device to device.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Mobility has become such a celebrated way of life that we now presume that, to be truly digital, we have to be truly mobile — the figure of the millennial digital native as the global citizen who navigates geographies, cultures, distances and time easily has emerged as the face of the digital. In our quest for mobile information, we have also created ourselves as mobile people. Mobility is now equated with flexibility and is an increasing skill that is required in new workforces. Mobility is rewarded and also incentivised by the labour markets that are supported by gig economies like Uber. The mobile body in its interaction with the mobile devices is the new normal.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">And yet, it is good to remember that the mobility we see as natural and desirable is a condition of privilege. The mobile phone might have penetrated the last mile in developing countries but it does not guarantee meaningful access or inclusion of large parts of underprivileged communities in the mobility networks. Even as new digital competition lowers the threshold of access and affordability, it is good to remember that having a mobile and being mobile are not the same thing. We are slowly witnessing different kinds of users beginning to get onto mobile networks, but their connectivity is always going to be undermined — the mobility expected from the mobile bearing bodies can be afforded only by those who can calibrate lives without the established social safety nets of static living. A mobile life is a migrant life which has uprooted individuals from families, communities and contexts, which might have supported them in times of crises.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The mobile individual has to form new connections, forge new support systems, and learn to cope with the precariousness of mobility in a way that is unprecedented. Otherwise, the continued reports of depression, burn-out, breakdown and mental health issues that we find increasing in digital migrant populations, is only going to get dire. If we make mobility the precondition of being digital, it is time to insist that the infrastructure of digital India is accompanied by the infrastructure of care for the digital Indian.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-july-30-2017-digital-native-ever-on-the-go-digital-india-mobility'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-july-30-2017-digital-native-ever-on-the-go-digital-india-mobility</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2017-08-07T15:54:46ZBlog Entry