The Centre for Internet and Society
http://editors.cis-india.org
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Of Surrogate Futures and Scattered Temporalities
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/surrogate-futures-scattered-temporalities
<b>There can be no refuting Michael Edwards’ claim that the world we live in is not only thick with problems, but that the problems that we are collectively trying to address are ‘thick...complex, politicized and unpredictable...complicated and contested’.</b>
<p>This is what he calls the ‘magic bullet’ approach to accounting for the work we do in a language and framework shaped by neo-liberal and corporate productivity in the age of late-capitalism. It is also difficult to disagree with the fact that the solutions we work with, are often too thin, fetishising enumeration of impact more than actual systemic change in areas of intervention.</p>
<p>His call for significantly transforming ‘existing systems of knowledge, politics and economics’ reminds me of another moment of crisis that Michel Foucault was addressing when he called for a systemic change in conditions of ‘<a class="external-link" href="http://prernalal.com/scholar/Foucault,%20Michel%20%282002%29%20The%20Order%20Of%20Things.%20An%20Archaeology%20Of%20The%20Human%20Sciences.%20London%3B%20Routledge.pdf">Life, Labour and Language</a>’ as a means of restructuring the human condition. I find Foucault’s formulation as a direct complement to Edwards’ triangulation because in his design of the futures, there is an inspiring prominence given to affect, affection, belonging, cohesion, and happiness – things which are often lost in the world of ‘quantiphilia’ that accompanies the ‘quick-fix cost efficient’ alternatives that are gaining centrality in contemporary development discourse..</p>
<p>I find myself nodding vigorously at Edwards’ fine critique of technocratic social innovation that is being offered as the panacea that shall cure all our problems from authoritarian regimes (as in the case of the Arab Spring) to poverty and mortality (as being supported in Asian and African countries to counter unemployment and AIDS).</p>
<p>In the knowledge collaboration on<a class="external-link" href="http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause/News/Digital-AlterNatives-with-a-Cause-book"> Digital Natives with a Cause? with Hivos</a>, we have increasingly found that it is necessary to think of technology, not as a tool of mediation and arbitration (or of mobilisation and organisation) but as a condition of living. The extraordinary focus on granting access and facilitating inclusion in the digital world often misses out on the need to build social, cultural, political, intellectual, financial and emotional infrastructure that allows for a new kind of collaboratively formed action to come into being.</p>
<p>Instead, following the battle cries of an almost redundant ICT for Development (ICT4D) warrior, governments, NGOs and civil societies are obsessively building physical infrastructure without taking into consideration the quality of access, life, safety, responsibility and change that these technologies bring in. A concentration on these technologies as benign tools (much as a hammer is, till it comes and hits you on the head) obfuscates the complicated, or to use Edwards’ term ‘thick’ reality of technology ecology (politics, power and culture) and instead produces ‘thin’ solutions which are generally one-size, and fit nobody.</p>
<p>These thin solutions also, often depend on heroic individuals rather than Everyday Digital Natives who can actually produce change from the bottom-up, in ways that might be outside the scale, scope and understanding of traditional NGO work.</p>
<p>And yet, I have some reservations in the futures that Edwards conjures for those of us who work with, at, within and through INGOs towards a collective vision of global human development. I shall try and work through them, deeply appreciative of the provocations that Edwards sets forward in this thought-piece and recognising this as building upon his ideas - more a dialogue than an irresolute conflict. And to map my arguments, I am going to fall upon 2 metaphors that I have been thinking through in the last few months.</p>
<p>Surrogacy: Quickly defined as a process where One takes the place of Another, I offer Surrogacy as a way of problematizing Edwards’ rather persuasive metaphor of ‘bridging’. While the essay insightfully looks at the problem of INGOs as a product of their times, and their need to radically restructure their form and practice, the idea of bridging does not offer enough departure from the very points of origin that are being critiqued.</p>
<p>The imagination of an INGO of the future as mediating, arbitrating, managing, making interventions still strongly adheres to the idea that the INGO is essentially a surrogate structure that stands in for the State, the Community, the Society, the Individual, in the furtherance of its goal.</p>
<p>This surrogate structure has been at the centre of most rights based and development design in the last half-century and has led to many problems that fail to address questions of sustainability and longevity. If, we were to rethink the role of the INGO in the future, they cannot be merely about acknowledging different local movements and political happenstance.</p>
<p>We need to look at what happens when the surrogate structure of peerage, patronage and protection is dismantled to initiate change.</p>
<p>One possible solution is to look at the INGO – like I was arguing with technologies – not as actors or agents of change. The ambition might be to imagine the INGO as producing conditions within which change happens, thus looking at a wider investment within different sectors and actors of change, which goes beyond merely capacity building or short term thin solutions.</p>
<p><strong>Temporality</strong>: The commonsensical understanding of the contemporary is something that belongs to its own time. We use the idea of the contemporary to refer to simultaneity of events. Martin Heidegger, in his brilliant treatise on ‘Being and Time’ suggests that the Contemporary does not refer to 2 things happening at the same time but actually refers to 2 things that do not belong to the same time, happening together.</p>
<p>It is a powerful way of proposing a Heterotemporality or diverse times within which different geo-political contexts and socio-cultural movements exist. There seems to be a unified future that we are talking about when we look at the notion of our collective futures. However, it might be more fruitful to realise that there are various futures which might actualise at different times and that there has to be a way of accounting for this temporal diversity, which does not yet reflect in our plans for the future.</p>
<p>The Heterotemporality demands different languages, concepts, pasts and practices to come together to form specific and flexible futures for the people we work with. If the century of development work has taught us something, it is the fact that imagining false futures for people who live in different temporalities often create great conditions of precarity, danger and violence for them.</p>
<p>Maybe it is time to first ask the question, “whose future are we addressing, when we talk about a future of the INGOs?” and start a new set of conversations about selective histories, visible presents and imagined futures that inform our discourse and practice in contemporary times.</p>
<p>Photo credit main picture: A connection between past and future, by Gioia De Antoniis</p>
<p>Read the original published in The Broker <a class="external-link" href="http://www.thebrokeronline.eu/Blogs/Future-Calling-blog/Of-surrogate-futures-and-scattered-temporalities">here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/surrogate-futures-scattered-temporalities'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/surrogate-futures-scattered-temporalities</a>
</p>
No publisher
nishant
Internet Governance
2011-12-30T10:15:12Z
Blog Entry
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Geekup @ CIS
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/mozilla-it
<b>CIS is hosting a Geekup tomorrow, December 27, 2011 in its office in Bangalore. Shyam Mani will be giving a talk.</b>
<h2>Shyam Mani<br /></h2>
<p>Based out of Singapore, Shyam (aka fox2mike on IRC and most of the intertubes) is one of the folks on the Mozilla IT team outside the USA. A geek at heart, he’s a part-time Gentoo developer, loves photography and volunteers as a race official for Formula 1 races in Singapore and Australia.</p>
<h2>A peek into Mozilla IT</h2>
<p>Mozilla IT manages over 7 datacenters in San Jose, Santa Clara, Phoenix in the US and Amsterdam as well as Beijing and 7 offices in Mountain View, San Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto, Paris, Auckland and Beijing with over 4000 servers and virtual machines. They support Mozilla's mission on a 24/7 basis by making sure critical infrastructure functions as expected and is always available (when they're not being BOFHs). The 45 member strong team is primarily based out of the US and has a person each in India and Singapore.</p>
<p>This talk will provide an insight into Mozilla's Infrastructure in terms of scale and the methods/tools used to manage the same.</p>
<p>We will open with lightning talks from Bangalore's geeks. That means you. Give us a 5-10 minute intro to the tools you use or how your organization's IT is structured. Help get the mood going before Shyam's talk.</p>
<h3>Schedule</h3>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Welcome with tea, coffee and snacks</td>
<td>18:00 - 18:15</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Lightning Talks</td>
<td>18:15 - 19:00</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>A peek into Mozilla IT</td>
<td>19:00 - 20:00</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<h3>Register now</h3>
<p>The venue has limited capacity</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://geekup.in/2011/fox2mike">Fill out the form</a> to confirm your participation. We have limited space at the venue and may not be able to accommodate everyone. <a class="external-link" href="http://geekup.in/2011/fox2mike">Registration</a> will allow us to keep you updated about the talk. Do tell us something about yourself so we know whom we are expecting. </p>
<p><strong>Our privacy policy:</strong> We do not share your info. </p>
<div id="register-now"> Also see the <a class="external-link" href="http://hasgeek.com/">HasGeek website</a></div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/mozilla-it'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/mozilla-it</a>
</p>
No publisher
praskrishna
Event Type
Internet Governance
2011-12-26T07:39:53Z
Event
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Exposing Data: Art Slash Activism
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/art-slash-activism
<b>Tactical Tech and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) organised a public discussion on the intersection of Art and Activism at the CIS office in Bangalore on 28 November 2011. Videos of the event are now online. Ward Smith (Lecturer, University of California, LA), Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszinsky (Co-founders, Tactical Technology Collective), Ayisha Abraham (Film maker, Srishti School of Art Design) and Zainab Bawa (Research Fellow, Centre for Internet and Society) spoke in this event.</b>
<p>In the information societies that we live in, data is the new currency. While data – objective enumerations of life – has been around as the basis of providing evidence in research, practice and art, there is a renewed attention on data as the digital technologies start mediating our everyday lives. Digitization (like electronification in earlier times) is a process by which messy, chaotic, everyday life can be sorted, classified, arranged and built into clean taxonomies that flatten the experiential and privilege the objective. In many ways, the process of ubiquitous digitization goes back to the Cartesian dualism of the immaterial mind over the emergent materiality of the body. Historically, different disciplines and practices within the social and natural sciences, humanities, arts, development work, and governmentality, etc. have established protocols to create robust, rigorous, efficient and reliable data that can be used as evidence for thought and action. These protocols are not permanent and are often questioned within the disciplinary framework but especially with interdisciplinary dialogues where conflicting methodologies and reading practices often render the same data sets unintelligible to each other.</p>
<p>With the rise of the digital, these disciplines and practices start new negotiations with the world of databases, networks and archives. There is a growing anxiety that data, which was supposed to be an objective representation of reality, is increasingly becoming opaque in how it is structured. There is also an increasing awareness that the work that we make the —‘idea of data’— is not transparent. The Exposing Data Project came as a response to these anxieties, as we seek to unpack the processes, methodologies, challenges and implications of living in a data-rich, data-based world mediated by digital and internet technologies through a cross-disciplinary multi-sectoral dialogue.</p>
<p>Exposing Data is a curated practice of bringing together differently located researchers, academics, practitioners, policy actors, artists and public interlocutors to tease out the tensions and conflicts that digital data brings to their own practice and thought, especially when talking to people who are ‘not like us’.</p>
<p align="center"><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/DSC03518.JPG/image_large" alt="Art Slash Activism1" class="image-inline" title="Art Slash Activism1" /></p>
<p>For its first conversation titled ‘Art Slash Activism’, we decided to look at the tensions that often split communities and practices across historically drawn battle lines. There has been a huge tension between artists and activists, who, even though they often use same kind of data sets, are often at logger-heads when it comes to using that data for their practice. Artists, especially those dealing with public and community art projects, often work in the same spaces and communities as the activists, in making strong political statements and working towards a progressive liberal ideology. Activism has depended on artistic expressions – especially those around free speech, censorship, surveillance, human rights, etc. – in order to not only find peer support but also to oppose authoritarian forces that often seek to quell artistic voices. And yet, within the larger communities, the idea of political art – art that makes direct political statements – or activism as an art form – activism that takes the form of cultural production and overt subversion – often emerges as problematic. ‘Art Slash Activism’ brought together four people, identified (reluctantly, because they wear so many different hats) as an academic, as a researcher, as an activist and as an artist, who all straddle these chasms in their own work, to unpack the tensions through the lens of digital data.</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.iids.org/witnessed/interviews/zb/interview-zb.html">Zainab Bawa</a>, who is a research fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society, working on a monograph that deals with politics of transparency in Indian e-governance systems, set out the terms of the debate as she questioned the very meaning of the word ‘data’. Zainab, by looking at case-studies of land-record digitization in the country, started to look at how the word ‘data’, despite its apparent transparency and objectivity, is actually an opaque concept that eclipsed the politics of data formation – what gets identified as data? What gets discarded as noise? Who gets to identify something as data? What happens to things which are not data? What happens to people who cannot be identified through data? What are the systems of rationality that we inherit to talk of data?</p>
<p><strong>Video of Zainab Bawa Talk</strong></p>
<iframe src="http://blip.tv/play/AYLhz3IA.html" frameborder="0" height="250" width="250"></iframe><embed style="display:none" src="http://a.blip.tv/api.swf#AYLhz3IA" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed>
<p>These questions persisted through the different conversations but were brought into plain site when Ayisha Abraham, a film and video artist who also teaches at the <a class="external-link" href="http://srishti.ac.in/">Sristhi School of Art Design</a>, showed us a digitally restored piece of an old film that disintegrated even as it was being saved. Heidegger in his Basic Writings had proposed that “Art assumes that the truth that discloses itself in the work can never be derived from outside.” Ayisha built on this idea to look at material historicity and physical presence of data to question the easy availability of data that has been established for data in art practices. When does data come into being? What precedes data? What happens to data when it decays beyond belief? How do we restructure reality in the absence of data? She mapped the role of affective restructuring, historical reconstruction and creative fictions in our everyday life when we deal with realities which cannot be supported by data.</p>
<p><strong>Video of Ayisha Abraham Talk</strong></p>
<iframe src="http://blip.tv/play/AYLh0BEA.html" frameborder="0" height="250" width="250"></iframe><embed style="display:none" src="http://a.blip.tv/api.swf#AYLh0BEA" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed>
<p>Ward Smith added a layer of complication in his questioning of the established cause-effect relationship that data has with Reality. Within activism as well as in development and policy work, there is an imagination that data always followed reality – that it is a distilled set of abstractions based on experiences, information, knowledge, analyses, etc. However, Ward presented us with a case-study that shows that data is not benign. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Often, the creation of data sets and databases leads to construction of alternative and new material realities. Even within existing realities, the introduction of a data set or an attempt to account for the reality using data, produces new and evolved forms of reality. Drawing partly from the discussions within digital taxanomies and partly from conversations in quantum philosophy (remember Schrodinger’s Cat?) Ward showed how data realities need to be unpacked to reveal what lies underneath.</p>
<p><strong>Video of Ward Smith Talk</strong></p>
<iframe src="http://blip.tv/play/AYLh0DUA.html" frameborder="0" height="250" width="250"></iframe><embed style="display:none" src="http://a.blip.tv/api.swf#AYLh0DUA" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.tacticaltech.org/team">Marek Tuszinsky</a> rounded up the conversations by introducing us to different ways of looking at data. Drawing from a rich ethnographic and experience data set at the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.tacticaltech.org/">Tactical Technology Collective</a>, Marek questioned how our relationships and reading practices – looking at data side-ways, for example – influences the shape, form, structure and meaning of the data under consideration. What came up was a compendium questions around data ethics, data values, our own strategies and reflectivity in dealing with a data-mediated and data-informed world. What are the kinds of imperatives that lead us to produce data? What methodologies do we deploy to render data intelligible? What kind of data manipulations do we engage in, in order to make it comprehensible to digital systems of archives and storage?</p>
<p><strong>Video of Marek Tuzinsky Talk</strong></p>
<iframe src="http://blip.tv/play/AYLh0HcA.html" frameborder="0" height="250" width="250"></iframe><embed style="display:none" src="http://a.blip.tv/api.swf#AYLh0HcA" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed>
<p>What are the politics of exclusion, inclusion and making invisible of data sets?</p>
<p>The conversation further opened up to the other participants in the conversation to crystalise around three areas of concern:</p>
<h3>Data Decay</h3>
<p>An audience member pointed out that one is always confronted with the physical decay of data. While old film is an incredibly fragile medium, it has survived over 70 years to become a part of Ayisha’s work. A digital format, on the other hand, would likely become inaccessible within six years due to format changes and problems with compatibility. The discussion shifted to the temporary aspect of data. The digitization of data allows one to illuminate it in significant ways by adding new components and blowing up details of focus. Such options are not available in analogue form.</p>
<p>However, the fact that digital media has a limited lifespan is something that one must consider. Are we depicting data for immediate attention and action, or for future reference? How far down the timeline of history do we want our records to stretch? Regardless of whether the producers of the film that turned out to be a hidden treasure for Ayisha asked these questions, the persistence of the film 70 years later served to illuminate an important moment in history and spoke of lives and stories the knowledge of which is still of interest and inspiration in our time. The future accessibility of data can be seen as our legacy and the inheritance of the generations to come. </p>
<h3>Data Realities / Subjects</h3>
<p>At the same time, can we be sure of the factual nature of recovered and existing data? It is important to ask who commissioned the source of information, who collected the data, who depicted and disseminated it? When asking “who”, one should also ask what their motives were, what resources they had and what settings they were working in. These are only several factors that influence the accuracy, message and understanding of the presented data. </p>
<p>Data has political power, being used as a catalyst and a justifying factor for various policies and interventions. However, data that is collected and presented by policy makers, research organizations, NGO’s, and other institutions may not reflect the realities as they are experienced by the population represented by the data. Researchers may be asking the wrong questions, or seeking answers in the wrong places, as it was the case in the Atlanta homeless programs discussed in Ward’s presentation. Inaccurate or incomplete data can confuse cause and effect, as well as become the cause in and of itself by feeding into stereotypes and creating faulty convictions that shape conventional views and social action. </p>
<h3>Data Values</h3>
<p>The importance of deconstructing the nature of how data is presented was remarked on by an audience member. The question posed was how, in the process of data collection and presentation, one can make data more reflective of reality as it is experienced by the studied population through incorporating grassroots efforts to create a community-based ownership of data. </p>
<p>To tackle this question, Marek brought up the example of mapping out the Kibera slum in Kenya. An open source approach was used in the project, where locals actively participated in the process of mapping. However, as Marek pointed out, it was still an intervention from outside the community. Somebody funded the project, someone gave the equipment, and they followed a certain methodology for reasons of their own. A completely unbiased and neutral representation of the slum was not possible due to the various agendas and perspectives of the parties involved, the dominant agenda being that of the project funders. Complete objectivity, even when efforts are made, is impossible.</p>
<p>Is it really more data that we need then? Even though information exists, it may not be accurate and not everyone within the society has an equal reach to it. A worker from a village lacking in literacy skills has significantly less access to data than a PHD student from a renowned university, even though they both navigate within the same system. Access to data stems farther than what is put up on a website or a file that can be picked up from a government office. More important than having access to open data, Zainab believes that one should look for relationships and systems where there is responsiveness and responsibility of negotiating. </p>
<p>However, what came clear from the discussion is that there are existent infrastructures that enable researchers and activists in their quest for information and its fair representation. People, in their interactions with each other, in the institutions and ad hoc organizations we develop, take part in creating these enabling infrastructures. Being embedded in the system within which one is collecting information allows one to understand and manoeuvre the necessary avenues. Questions of data collection, representation, and dissemination are multidisciplinary, spanning across issues that touch all members of our society. From land property records, old abandoned film, government statistics, classifications, and artists’ quest for truth, data takes many forms and defines our lives in ways we cannot always control. Through revaluation and questioning of these processes we gain a better understanding of what shapes societal views, government action, and how we can take control and use data to illuminate the unseen and wheel social change.</p>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/DSC03542.JPG/image_large" alt="Art Slash Activism 3" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Art Slash Activism 3" /></p>
<p>This has been the first of our experiments at creating dialogues around Exposing Data. We invite people interested in these questions, to not only participate in the future conversations, but also help us draw upon different disciplines, questions and concerns around the subject of Data. The next conversation seeks to address the question of “Whose data is it anyway?” and we hope that the momentum of talk carries on.</p>
<p>Nishant Shah<br />Maya Ganesh<br />Yelena Gulkhandanyan</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/art-slash-activism'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/art-slash-activism</a>
</p>
No publisher
praskrishna
Internet Governance
2011-12-29T13:31:12Z
Blog Entry
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US Clampdown Worse than the Great Firewall
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/us-clampdown
<b>If you thought China’s Internet censorship was evil, think again. American moves to clean up the Web could hurt global surfers, writes Sunil Abraham in this article published in Tehelka, Volume 8, Issue 50, 17 December 2011.</b>
<p>TWO PARTICULARLY terrible pieces of legislation — the PROTECT-IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) — have been introduced in the US Senate and House of Representatives. If passed, the US administration will be empowered to shut down specific websites using the same four measures it employed in its failed attempt to shut down WikiLeaks — domain name system (DNS) filtering, blocking financial transfers via financial intermediaries, revoking hosting and sanitising search engine results. SOPA represents the perfect policy interest overlap between a State clamping down on freedom of expression and IPR-holders protecting their obsolete business models. After all it was Bono who publicly articulated the unspoken desire of many right-holders: “We know from China’s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent that it’s perfectly possible to track content.”</p>
<p>China fortunately only censors the Internet for its own citizens, the Great Firewall does not, for example, prevent access to knowledge by Indian netizens. SOPA will enable the US to censor the global Internet unilaterally. The Great Firewall can be circumvented using tools like Tor, but SOPA will in many ways make its targets disappear for the average user. DNS filtering, even when implemented in a single country, has global consequences. DNS, one of the foundational mechanisms of the Internet, is an address look-up service that allows users to translate domain names (e.g. cisindia.org — easier for humans to remember) into IP addresses (e.g. 202.190.125.69 — easier for machines). The most critical servers in the global DNS hierarchy are the root servers, or today’s server clusters. Mandated DNS filtering would result in some DNS servers returning different IP addresses than other DNS servers for certain domain names. With PROTECT-IP and SOPA, these global consequences would be at unprecedented levels given that seven of the 13 server clusters that constitute the DNS root fall within US jurisdiction. We already have some indication where this is headed. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency announced recently that it has seized 150 domain names for alleged IPR infringement.</p>
<p>We must remember that IPR policy in some countries has been configured in public interest to take advantage of the exceptions and limitations afforded by the TRIPS (trade-related aspects of IPR) agreement. In others, even though the letter of the law goes beyond TRIPS requirements, access by ordinary citizens is protected because of poor enforcement of these maximalist policies. E-commerce platforms that sell Micromax, Karbonn, Spice and Lava mobile phones that are manufactured in China may be taken offline because an American court is convinced of patent infringement. An online publisher of George Orwell’s books, which are public domain in Russia, India and South Africa but still under copyright in the US and Europe, may have its Paypal account blocked.</p>
<div class="pullquote">After the witch-hunt against WikiLeaks, policymakers have realised the extent of American hypocrisy</div>
<p>In the recent past, activists in authoritarian regimes and democracies with draconian Internet laws have leveraged US Internet freedom rhetoric. This was first deployed by Hillary Clinton in early 2010 after Google’s melodramatic withdrawal from China. Even then, many observers were convinced that this was just selective tokenism and the real agenda was domination of global markets by US-based MNCs. Today, after the witch-hunts against WikiLeaks and Anonymous, global policymakers have realised the extent of American hypocrisy.</p>
<p>Fortunately, opposition for SOPA has cut across traditional political and ideological divides — libertarians, liberal human rights organisations and political conservatives who believe in small government and also modern- day capitalists like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Let us pray that Kapil Sibal registers his protest with the Obama administration to protect the online aspirations of millions of Indian citizens and entrepreneurs.</p>
<p>Read the original published in Tehelka <a class="external-link" href="http://www.tehelka.com/story_main51.asp?filename=Op171211proscons.asp">here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/us-clampdown'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/us-clampdown</a>
</p>
No publisher
sunil
Freedom of Speech and Expression
Public Accountability
Internet Governance
2012-01-26T20:42:14Z
Blog Entry
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Now Streaming on Your Nearest Screen
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/streaming-on-your-nearest-screen
<b>Digital cinema, especially the kinds produced using mobile devices and travelling on Internet social networking systems like YouTube and MySpace, are often dismissed as apolitical and ‘merely’ a fad. Moreover, content in the non-English language, due to incomprehensibility or lack of understanding of the cultural context of the production, is labeled as frivolous, or inconsequential, writes Nishant Shah in this peer reviewed essay published in the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Volume 3, Issue 1, June 2009.</b>
<h3>Contextualising new digital cinema through Kuso<a name="fr1" href="#fn1">[1]</a></h3>
<p>Deploying the aesthetic framework of kuso as political engagement, this essay analyzes how its ‘aesthetic’ form of expression offers spaces of political participation and negotiation for the ‘Strawberry Generation’ digital natives in Taiwan. This paper draws from various youth phenomena like the emergence of the ‘BackDorm Boys’ as iconic representations of flawed stardom, the adoption of kuso lifestyles and the consumption/distribution cycles of cinema on the web to see the possibilities they offer for political engagement and participation through cultural expressions and productions, that are otherwise dismissed in contemporary discourse.</p>
<p>New digital technologies, initially developed for surveillance and strategic communication, because of the proliferation of the internet/s and the cyberspaces, have now become freely available at very inexpensive rates around the world. The easy availability of these technologies enables new conditions of production of hitherto privileged art forms. The new globalised circuits of un-contextualized distribution lead to the imagination of a deterritorialized community of consumers who share common systems of making meaning and receiving these objects. As has been noted in earlier cybercultures studies, objects found on the internet/s – the people and the narratives that they produce - are often consumed as outside of time and geographical space. William J. Mitchell (1996) in his now much critiqued conception of the ‘Infobahn’, conflates all geographical distinction in his imagining of the larger neural circuits of digital information and economy. Similarly, in his extraordinary book. Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger (2007), explores the role that digital dissemination and distribution (as also storage and archiving) play in evolving a new miscellaneous form of sorting and classification, thus deconstructing established coda of knowledge determination. Weinberger, despite the keen insight into the importance of metadata and user-based personalised galaxies of information, is unable to talk of the entire range of phenomena as rooted in particular geo-political contexts. In fact, as Gasser and Palfresy (2008) make evident in their book Born Digial, whenever a body is referred to within cybercultures studies, it is the body of a white, upper class, masculine body; whenever a place is evoked, it is unequivocally the economic centres of the North-West; Time, which is an affiliate of the space and the body, is also then the linear and historical time determined by these concrete referents.</p>
<p>The West, with its wide consumer base and widespread proliferation of new digital technologies, often becomes the hegemonic legitimising authority as objects produced elsewhere are understood through ‘foreign’ aesthetics and logistics. Imagining the internet/s as residing outside of the time-space continuums, allows for a cyclical re-assertion of the Western paradigms as credible and authentic, and other forms as parodic or derivative in nature. New forms of cultural expression and narrativisation, received outside of the context of their production or the circuits of distribution and reception, are often mis-read and interpreted to fit the existing modes of making meaning.</p>
<p>This paper is an attempt to look at a specific form of new digital cinema in North East Asia that challenges the west-centric modes of understanding these objects. New digital cinema is a category that needs to be more sharply defined. In the last three decades of extensive technological advent and deployment in the fields of cinematic production, many different forms have claimed the space of new digital cinema. Post-celluloid cinema,<a name="fr2" href="#fn2">[2]</a> production of movies augmented by technologies, studio house experiments in animation and 3D technologies, distribution of movies and the networks of piracy that come into being with peer2peer networks,<a name="fr3" href="#fn3">[3]</a> conditions of reception and movie watching with digitally owned copies of movies,<a name="fr4" href="#fn4">[4]</a> the emergence of multiplex cinema and conditions of consumption,<a name="fr5" href="#fn5">[5]</a> etc. have been looked upon by different theoreticians and practitioners as new digital cinema.</p>
<p>I use the term ‘new digital cinema’ in the rest of the paper in a very specific sense of the phrase to make a very clear point of departure from the aforementioned approaches, which, though exploring the possibilities that digital technologies offer, still, often, stay with contained and unquestioned understanding of the established cinematic practices of production, authorship, distribution and spectatorship. New digital cinema is located in the new wave of cinematic forms produced by people who are enabled to do so by the easy availability of conditions of production and distribution that are framed by new digital technologies. Instead of looking at movies being produced by ‘film-makers’ or ‘film-studios’, maintaining the distinctions of authorship, readership and distribution circuits, I explore movies which are produced by people who are otherwise relegated to the realm of spectatorship and consumption. For the scope of this paper, new digital cinema refers to the cheaply produced cinematic forms, shot through inexpensive and slowly-becoming ubiquitous camera enabled devices. Geared towards an almost obscene abundance of details and demanding an untiring self-narrativisation,<a name="fr6" href="#fn6">[6]</a> these sites of social networking and expression have led to the production of videos and distribution of the self in unprecedented ways. These videos are further marked in their distribution through cyberspatial forms like YouTube, MySpace, and Google video, Television based reality shows based that run on user based programming consisting of personal videos, personal webcam sites, and MMS forums, to millions of users who enter into an interaction that is no longer limited to spectatorship.</p>
<p>There are three dialectic processes around the ‘personal’ videos broadcast on such sites of digital social networking and sharing, that need to be mapped in order to understand the impulse of this paper as well as to look at the dialectic reconstruction of earlier categories as understood by non-digital, pre-internet cultural forms. The first trope of dialectic comes in the form of continuity. Histories of technology taking the When Old Technologies were New (Marvyn, 1988) approach, often produce these digital moving images as bearing a relational value with the emergence of earlier technological forms and the use of these forms to produce personal narratives – print, camera, video, to name the three most influential forms of self expression and narrativisation. Such a historical narrative, unless carefully inflected with the growth and development of indigenous technologies and the indigenisation of these technologies, reads both, the technological development as well as the cultural forms thus produced, only through a West-centric paradigm of aesthetics, glossing over the differences that might be present in the very process and methods of reading such technologised forms. This non-disruptive, uninterrupted historicisation, while it is fruitful in questioning some presumed categories in the process of cultural production,<a name="fr7" href="#fn7">[7]</a> still reinforce these digital moving images as merely a new form of old cinema.</p>
<p>The second tension that needs to be mapped out occurs in the form of carefully maintained distinctions between the Sacred Cow of originality and the much maligned miasma of derivative, plagiarised, copied (left, right, centre), forms that have been facilitated by the proliferation of copy-paste digital technologies and internet networks. In the public as well as the theoretical discourse around these digital moving images, there is almost a Universal original (generally Western, otherwise canonised by the Western gaze in other geo-political contexts), to which everything else has a relation that is either praodic or uniformly derivative in nature. Even within the West, these videos on youtube and myspace are easily dismissed as plagiarised or unoriginal, often leading to a wide range of public controversy and exchange.<a name="fr8" href="#fn8">[8]</a></p>
<p>The third dialectic is in the blurring of the pre-digital accepted terms of producers, spectators and processes of reading that these digital moving images produce. It is necessary to realise that the context of not only the production but also that of the reader is crucial to understanding the aesthetics of cyberspatial forms. The author in the digital world is as digital and ephemeral as the object itself. The tension between the corporeal and the digital has been effectively resolved by conceptualising the ‘interface’ – the space between the two conflicting and tense oppositional ideas- as the bearer of thought, idea, meaning and intention for digital objects. Such a complex structuring challenges the earlier crystalised practices authorship, spectatorship, distribution and reception, thus marking new digital cinema as not merely a cinematic practice augmented by technology but as a new form of cinema that challenges, quite radically, the earlier cinematic forms, in very much the same way that, in another historical and cultural moment, the print did to the manuscript.</p>
<p>This paper locates itself in these three dialectical flows to explore new digital cinema as a form of popular and cultural expression in Asia, specifically in Taiwan. It hopes to dismantle the myth of the universal/accessible/west-centric view of new digital cinema and demonstrate the need to assert the geo-socio-cultural contexts of their origin through exploring the aesthetics and genre of Kuso.</p>
<h3>Knowing Miso from Kuso</h3>
<p>Kuso, though it is a relatively new term, is highly popular in describing the new cybercultural forms that emerged with the proliferation of the internet/s. Anime fans are familiar with Kuso as an expletive or an interjection, used as the English equivalent of ‘Shit!’ Though Japanese in origin, it was made popular as a word, an aesthetic and a lifestyle in Taiwan around 2000, subsequently spreading to Hong Kong and China. Now, Kuso, along with other N.E. Asian products like Hentai,<a name="fr9" href="#fn9">[9]</a> and Manga, is a popular way of identifying cybercultural forms. The wikipedia mentions that
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<p class="callout">[t]he roots of Taiwanese “Kuso’ was Kuso-ge’s from Japan. The word Kuso-ge is a portmanteau of Kuso and game, which means, quite literally, “shitty games.” The introduction of such a category is to teach gamers how to appreciate and enjoy a game of poor quality – such as appreciating the games’ outrageous flaws instead of getting frustrated at them. <br />(Wikipedia, 2006)</p>
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<p>It was an attempt to not only identify or locate flaws but to celebrate them and encourage an active production of them. Kuso, for the younger generation in Taiwan (and the thousands of fans all around the world, who subscribe to Kuso Bulletin Boards and discussion forums) is not just a cursory form of parody but a lifestyle. A Taiwanese artist, Yeh Yi-Li, in her solo exhibition, seems to suggest that as well. Her introduction to her exhibition titled ‘KUSO – Red, Spring Snow, Orange Flower’ says</p>
<p class="callout">In Taiwan’s pop culture, internet subculture and video gamers’ communities, it (Kuso) became a trendy term that suggests “making fun of anything, playing practical jokes on everything.” KUSO subverts conventional values and turns things into garbage. It has no limits, history, agendas or logic. Like an amoeba, it is a subculture phenomenon that has no rules. (Yi-Li, 2006)</p>
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<p>Making a list of characteristics of what might be Kuso is futile. As Yi-Li seems to suggest, Kuso, on the surface, is located on the ‘fun’ and ‘hilarity’ of an object. However, Kuso actually resides in the processes of subversion and resistance. Kuso not only makes ‘things into garbage’ but also, by logical corollary, turns ‘garbage into things’. It started as a subculture phenomenon but is now highly popular in mainstream cultures – on reality TV on youth oriented channels like MTV and Channel V, in local performances and spectacles, and in Stephen Chou movies. Kuso seems to refer to not just the discourse around a particular object but a subjective mode of representing the self into different narrative conditions enabled by new digital technologies. Kuso is about the ability to create fluid and transitory spectacles of the self as a trope of social interaction and communication. While Yi-Li might look upon Kuso as without ‘limits, history, agendas or logic’, she forgets that Kuso has been the way for organising political protests, flash mobs and social awareness collectives in many part of Asia.<a name="fr10" href="#fn10">[10]</a> It is in this very ‘free’ and ‘excessive’ structure of Kuso that one can locate the politics and processes by which New Digital Cinema can be understood.</p>
<p>In her Kuso exhibition, Yi-Li created the ‘Worm-man’ that</p>
<p class="callout">drags its body and slithers in the ever-changing world. In different kinds of worlds, the Worm-man develops into different phases. As phenomena are happening, it is also transforming. The Worm-man has multipe possibilities, multiple personalities and multiple identities. <br />(Yi-Li, 2006)</p>
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<p>While Kuso is often understood as parody, trash culture or camp humour, and is even attributed to MTV style movies by enthusiasts, for the large section of Kuso consumers, it is the governing principle for social interaction, dressing and appearance, hair and accessories, consumption of products and modes of expression. Kuso seems to be a way in which they produce themselves as parodic forms of themselves – producing themselves in conditions of constant transformation with ‘multiple possibilities, multiple personalities and multiple identities.’ As Yi-Li suggests in her art, Kuso is not just about producing parodies and mimicking popular art forms but it is also a way of producing the spectacle of the self. It is not surprising then, that Kuso emerges as an aesthetic with the proliferation of technologies and tools which allow for a narrativisation of the self for distribution and consumption in the public.</p>
<h3>Contexualising Kuso</h3>
<p>I look at two specific instances of Kuso to understand and frame the concept in this paper. The first emerged out of my own involvement with some of the students and their scheduled performances at the annual sports day.<a name="fr11" href="#fn11">[11]</a> My Chinese language teacher Mandy Hua, who is an undergraduate student at the NCU, is also a professional hip hop dancer. For her annual day performance at the university, Mandy chose (with some inputs from me) a popular Bollywood song that was creating raves in India at that time.<a name="fr12" href="#fn12">[12]</a> Mandy chose the song, edited the audio to make it tighter and shorter in duration and started the practice. Along with a flock of dancers from other schools on the campus, Mandy replicated an ‘Indian’ aesthetic for the song, doing elaborate costumes which included a lot of flowing skirts, veils, sequins and shimmer – the kind that was shown in the song. The female performers were in a state of erotic relationship – not only in their imitation of the seductive postures and movements of the dance sequence in the original movie song but also in presenting themselves as eroticised objects of glamour and desire to a young audience made primarily of students. The expected reactions of cat calls, of hooting, of lascivious laughter and of gasps of wonder and awe were all present in the crowd. However, a brief minute into the performance, their narrative of seduction, eroticism and obvious parody-imitation was disrupted and somehow harmoniously irrupted by a group of boys, wearing glasses, their bodies far from the perfectly sculpted eroticised bodies of the female performers, wearing clumsy looking ill-fitting karate dresses and making unrehearsed animal movements around the female performers.</p>
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<p>It was the introduction of these dancers that completely displaced the element of parody within which I understood the performance. The male performers, who were completely unfamiliar with the original song, were imitating the female dancers on the ground. They were not interested in replicating either the movements of the female dancers or the sequences they were following. They were more interested in undermining the very aesthetic that the female dancers were trying to replicate or produce. Their movements were jerky, unpractised, bordering on the ridiculous. Their half naked bodies were un-sculpted and uneroticised. These were not the college hunks or super jocks coming out to parade their masculinities but the ‘geeks’ or the ‘dorks’ who were ravelling in their un-eroticised status and celebrating it with gusto.</p>
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<p>What was more interesting was the way in which the audience was receiving these male performers. In spite of the engaged erotic relationship with the female performers, the audience was extremely appreciative of the male performers’ attempts at overthrowing the female performers’ spectacle. The audience was egging them to constantly be more ridiculous, be more flamboyant, be more self mocking, guiding their movements and actions, leading to a final mock chase sequence, where the male performers chased the female performers off the ground, stripped themselves to their shorts, flexed their un-muscled bodies and made their exit among huge cheering and applause. They were obviously the star attraction of the performance. Such a response was puzzling. It was the women who had put in hours of practice to produce themselves as erotic objects of consumption. The audience, in the beginning had engaged with them at that level. And yet, it was this bunch of slightly ‘with an L on my head’ guys who emerged in their buffoonery and antics as the heroes of the minute.</p>
<p>My first impulse was to read in it, the dynamics of a gendered space and a certain mock valorisation of this hyper masculinity. While gendered readings of the performance are indeed valuable and might offer an entry into looking at the construction of eroticism, desire, spectacle and the performative self, I am going to focus on the Kuso in this performance. My own gendered impulses were quickly overshadowed by the repeated use of the word Kuso that the members of the audience were using in order to explain the male performances. It was obvious that these male performers, in spite of their actions, were not really clowns but some sort of heroes and embodying this peculiar word – Kuso.</p>
<p>When I started asking around for Kuso, people pointed at several different objects, from Stephen Chou movies to Reality TV on Channel V, from personal videos to popular Kuso shows where people engaged in a set of ludicrous, often bizarre performances to make a public spectacle of themselves. The more I encountered these Kuso forms, the more difficult and incomprehensible it became to understand either the appeal or the aesthetic of the form. It looked like cheesy camp or an extension of a certain MTV aesthetic as a result of vulgarisation of technologies. When I crawled on the web looking at discussion forums that were devoted to Kuso, I found a huge number of people sharing my incomprehensibility and raised eyebrows at the Kuso objects, trying to figure out what it was that was attracting thousands of users to produce and consume Kuso with such dedication.</p>
<p>Especially in the context of Taiwan, Kuso belongs to the realm of what is called the ‘Strawberry Generation’ (Tsao-Mei Yi-Dai). The Strawberry generation in Taiwan refers to the people born between 1981 and 1991, and, despite its suggestions in English, carries negative connotations with it. The three most popular characteristics of the Strawberry generation – a phrase that has huge currency in popular media – have been severally explained. Rachel, who writes on the National Central University’s (Taiwan) website, explains:</p>
<p class="callout">In Taiwan, the Strawberry Generation refers to those who were born between 1981 and 1991, ranging from the 22-year-old university students to the 12-year-old junior high school students. This generation is labeled as “strawberry” due to two reasons: first, this generation of youth was raised in a better environment, as strawberries grown and nourished in a greenhouse, than the earlier generation. Second, strawberries are known for their beauty, delicacy and high price, suggesting that the young people can not withstand pressure, difficulties, and frustration as they grew up in a nice and comfortable environment and are able to get almost whatever they ask for.<br />(Rachel, 2008)</p>
<p>Henrry (2006), a student who also belongs to the Strawberry Generation, writes in his classroom assignment, ‘People of this generation are said to be fragile when facing pressure, just like the strawberries.’ He further goes on to suggest that the problems of the Strawberry Generation are largely economic in nature and might lead to serious problems for Taiwan’s economy. Myr Lim (2006) also looks at the economic and political instability of this generation and describes them as ‘Like the fruit, they look extremely good and sinfully juicy, who wouldn’t want one? But they have a very limited shelf life.’ Built into this criticism is also the understanding that the Strawberry Generation is also in a state of political disavowal.</p>
<p>And yet, when introduced to the different manifestations of Kuso, there was a very clear idea of resistance, subversion and mobilisation. A local incident, which made temporary heroes of two teenage boys who stripped in Public, on a university campus, was read as a sign of resisting the University’s attempts at regulating dress-codes for the students.<a name="fr13" href="#fn13">[13]</a> Other videos which were made for internet circulation had the digital natives refusing the Western models of masculinity or heroism and producing buffoon-like images to correspond with the glorified pop icons from the West – often producing infantile and juvenile forms of behaviour to exaggerate the effect. Other Kuso manifestations were in consumption, as different objects which were seemingly ‘cute’ (se-jiao) or ‘innocent’ were invested with sinister or often ludicrous intent.<a name="fr14" href="#fn14">[14]</a> The same kinds of aesthetics were also seen on the ‘LOL Cat’<a name="fr15" href="#fn15">[15]</a> and ‘All your base are belong to us’<a name="fr16" href="#fn16">[16]</a> internet memes which have gained currency online. It is while browsing through these worlds that I was introduced to a Kuso phenomenon which was garnering huge media and popular attention globally. This was a phenomenon which has now popularly been dubbed as the Backdorm Boys.</p>
<p>BackDorm Boys were three graduate students, two of whom became instant celebrities – Huang Yi Xin and Wei Wei - from the Guangzhu Academy of Fine Arts in China, who shot to instant fame when, in a state of boredom, they made a lip-sync cover version of popular Backstreet Boys singles, using nothing more than cheap digital cameras on their computers, in the restrictive space of their dormitories, and distributing them through video sharing spaces like YouTube, MySpace and other blogs (The Full Plate, 2008). These weren’t, at a first glance, very different from the ‘funny’ videos that one encounters online all the time – cheaply produced, shot with a webcam mounted on the screen, an almost unedited, uninterrupted full frontal frame, and an exaggerated attempt creating a certain Kitsch video that have gained popularity in the past. However, within my own contexts, the BackDorm Boys had strong resonances with the earlier dance performance I described. Once again, the three students in the videos were not the hyper eroticised masculinities that the boy bands like Backstreet Boys have embodied in popular cultures. Given the Confucian model of academia and studentship, students are not easily granted such erotic value to begin with. These were also not students who were particularly talented at singing. In fact, they were not singing at all, they were lip synching the songs in their videos. The videos did not involve any attempts at shooting but were in the full-frontal, almost pornographic frames of spectacle where the camera was mounted over the screen and the two performers were being caught in that frame. Dressed in identical clothes, the two main performers sang with extraordinary histrionics, the otherwise mellow and slightly cliché ridden love ballads that the Backstreet Boys had made their signature. In the background, one of their other dorm mates, played a Kuso-ge called Quaker throughout the video. He occasionally simulated the actions of a music mixer or a DJ or sometimes helped them with props.<a name="fr17" href="#fn17">[17]</a></p>
<p align="center"><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/boyz.jpg/image_preview" alt="Boys" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Boys" /></p>
<p align="left">There was, at the first glance, nothing spectacular about the Backdorm Boys. As one of the responders on a blog dedicated to the Backdorm Boys very succinctly puts it:</p>
<p align="left" class="callout">Let’s face it: it doesn’t take a lot of talent to make faces. They didn’t write the song, didn’t sing the song, didn’t play any musical instructions, etc. Their sole accomplishment is they made faces at a camera. That’s not talent, man!!! And if they weren’t Chinese—i.e., didn’t have the freak factor of Chinese boys lip-synching to Backstreet Boys songs—NOBODY will notice this.<br />Da Xiangchang 2005</p>
<p align="left">And yet, the Backdorm Boys, apart from cults developing around them and various internet memes devoted to them,<a name="fr18" href="#fn18">[18]</a> were featured live on NBC and both dropped out of their academic programmes to become hugely successful brand ambassadors and spokespersons for some of the largest mass media brands in China. They have both acquired a celebrity status and are role models and now popular media persons on TV channels, hosting their own shows.<a name="fr19" href="#fn19">[19]</a> In trying to understand these Kuso products in the realm of parody one starts asking the wrong kind of questions: where is the talent? Several respondents, including Da Xiangchang very pointedly pointed out that ‘it takes very little talent to make a fool out of yourselves.’ The more interesting question to ask would be the question that Yi-Li asked in her exhibition: How does Kuso manage to make garbage out of things? And further, is it possible, to read into Kuso, a new politics which guises itself as ‘fun’ or ‘hilarity’.</p>
<h3>Differentiating between parody and Kuso</h3>
<p>The Western gaze will only allow Kuso to be understood in a relationship of parody. However, looking at the contexts within which Kuso emerges and its ability to ‘make garbage out of things’, Kuso changes the relationship between the ‘original’ and the ‘discursive’ objects. parody, as a literary and a narrative form, resides more in the object being parodied (original) rather than in the parodic creation (discursive). To understand, appreciate or enjoy the discursive object, it becomes necessary to be familiar with, sometimes at a very intimate level, with the original object. The chief aim of a parody is to invoke the original object by introjecting it into new frames of references and meaning making, establishing a tenuous relationship of invocation between the original and the discursive objects. Parody seeks, not to replace the original but add to the ‘aura’ of the original object. Legends, myths, cult-stories and folklores can be understood as parodic in nature as they add to the understanding of the original or the core object. In the case of cinema especially, parody is not simply a process of poking fun at an earlier cinematic form or object but is an effort to evoke the original as a way of making meaning and seeking sense in the narrative.</p>
<p>The relationship between the original object and the discursive object is one of invocation where the parody invokes, glorifies and seeks justification for its existence through the original object. parody also resides in a certain historical reading of cinema as it produces often unintentional but present residues of earlier forms. parody can be looked upon as enabling a certain genealogical reading of cinematic narratives and forms. In the non-linear consumption patterns of cinema reception, especially with cable television and global distribution, the boundaries between the original and the discursive are often blurred and reconfigured. Often the audiences and consumers encounter the discursive before they get familiar with the original and hence they change the way in which the original object is understood or received, often mis/reading it through the lens of the parody instead of the other way round. Cinema also makes more visible, the ways in which the parody can also work through different genres and media – be it in the production of books that try to appropriate the cinematic language of telling stories or in the production of movies that are based on books or sometimes try to deploy the narrative conditions of books in the cinematic narratives. The only way to talk of parody is to read it in the cinematic object itself and in the invocations that it produces with the imagined or the real object. The concept of an original is necessary to the understanding of the parody.</p>
<p>It is exactly this relationship between the original and the parody that Kuso disrupts from the within. Kuso does not produce the definitive terminal points of the original and the discursive objects that parody requires. In the instance of any Backdorm Boys video, there is no presumed knowledge of either the Backstreet Boys videos or the kind of globalised consumption that they can be contextualised under. While there are many references – almost at the level of invocation, in the clothes that they wear, in the choices they make in songs etc. – they are not necessarily the frameworks through which their videos can be made meaning of. If it was merely a question of parody of Backstreet Boys, their subsequent videos where they also ‘Kuso-ed’ other performers and local artists would not have worked for their fans.</p>
<p>Like a network, the relationship between the original and the discursive objects of Kuso is masked so that each constantly feeds back into the other. Hence, in the case of the Backdorm Boys, if you tried to understand their work as simply a Chinese/Asian parody of a Western form of popular culture, you end up bewildered, unable to account for the huge popularity and success. However, if we place their production as Kuso, it allows us to realise that the objects being parodied in the videos, are not American popular cultural forms or specifically Backstreet Boys videos. What is being parodied is the original self of the performers.</p>
<p>Instead of the framework of parody or intertextuality, we can locate the Backdorm Boys Kuso videos as embedded in a particular lifestyle choices and consumption of cultural forms, accessories, appearances, class differences, language and most importantly the conditions made available by technologies. The original object is the three boys and their ‘real’ or ‘original’ status in their lived practices. The discursive object is also the three boys and their projected selves or desired selves which they are expected to either appropriate or wish for. The Kuso is in exaggerating the differences between these two and celebrating the obvious flaws in them and making them available as a public spectacle. While I shall steer away from discussions of talent, it becomes more evident that Kuso allows for us to recognise the aesthetics, politics and proliferation of these new digital cinema artefacts which earlier notions of parody did not.</p>
<p>Kuso establishes more non-linear, sometimes disruptive relationships, between different objects that it refers to in its production. The relationship between the various objects is not invocative but evocative in nature. The Kuso narrative does not presume specific knowledge of some other object being invoked. Instead, it produces a redolent relationship where the different objects mutually explain each other. Like any cyberspatial form, Kuso seems to produce a system of self-referential, almost cannibalistic meaning making where a range of objects seem to co-exist in improbably frames of non-real and in-credible, each forming a node through which the others are understood. The references Kuso makes in its narrative, are not to the other, original object in a wistfully reconstructed or imagined past but to the other back-tracking objects present in the narrative itself. This produces an almost infinite chain of inter-referencing objects that justify each others’ existence. Kuso thus disrupts the more linear and historical constructions that parody (and the subsequent attempts to read parody as a relationship between new digital cinema and Cinema) establishes. It is located in the materiality of the object, its reception, its manipulation, its distribution, its transformation and its ability to escape the more effective-causal circuits of meaning making.</p>
<p>While parody seeks to reaffirm the similarities between the original and the discursive objects, Kuso emphasises the inability of the original to explain the discursive, thus producing a relationship of difference rather than one of similarity. While parody deals with the questions of representation, Kuso enters into conditions of simulation. It is this evocative relationship that allows me to locate Kuso as an aesthetic of understanding New Digital Cinema in Asia and to materialise it as a lifestyle and as a condition of reception in the body of the Asian consumer.</p>
<h3>Politicising Kuso</h3>
<p>An uncontextualised notion of Kuso only allows for a relationship at the level of the Parodic. Hence, the discussants of the Backdorm Boys were always in a condition of unintelligibility about why these slightly clownish characters would become imitable heroes for a particular generation. Given the highly polarized nature of political orientations in Taiwan, it has been the despair of many educators and practitioners that the Strawberry Generation, which is also the largest subscriber base to Kuso, has no apparent interest in politics. It is a generally lamented as a generation that is unashamedly devoted only to having fun. I propose, in my reading and understanding of Kuso objects and Kuso as an aesthetic, that the participatory and performative nature of Kuso paradigm, offers space for negotiation and expression of political intent. I shall demonstrate this particular argument at two levels – the level of the body and the personal, and at the level of the public and the national.</p>
<p>The question of the body becomes central to almost all representation studies. Analysis of Kuso videos or objects lends itself easily to see how the accessorisation and the freedom to produce unsupervised spectatorial narratives of the self lead to new spaces of negotiation. There is also, very clearly, a definite deconstruction of the traditional, masculine and often imported forms of masculinity, femininity and sexuality which the videos lend themselves to. Cross dressing, excessive make-up, exaggerated actions, etc. all create a fluid world where gender structures used to define the body are dismissed and indeed, enter into parodic relationship with traditional perceptions or expectations. However, for the scope of this paper, I shall more narrowly focus on the construction of the heroic body in the Kuso videos.</p>
<p>The body comes to materialise Kuso through various practices and becomes the site upon which the Kuso self is enacted. As Kuso celebrates the flaws and exaggerates the imperfections, it allows for a certain masked relationship between the private self and the public politics. As is demonstrated in the case of the Backdorm Boys, Kuso, with its self referential boundaries, allows for a critical engagement with the very practices of the generation that subjects them to sever criticism. The Kuso bodies or the narratives of self are not longer in relation with the imagined body of the star or the aura of the star vehicle but in masked relationship with the larger politics of its time. The bewilderment or unintelligibility that the discussants of the Backdorm videos exhibit, is not particularly about why or how the video was created but how heroism or stardom was created by the celebration of the un-iconic or the unheroic.</p>
<p>And it is to answer this question that we go back to the Strawberry Generation again. The Strawberry Generation in Taiwan was not merely marked by economic transitions and infidelity. It is also a generation that has seen a severely politicised state of nationalism and national identity in Taiwan. The younger generation that grew up after the removal of the martial law has engaged in serious consumerism as a part of their national identity. As Chen Kuan Hsing (1998) points out, ‘From 1994 onwards…the cultural atmosphere was mediated through commodity structures.’ Chen further goes on to explain how the political economy and the question of the national are intrinsically linked. Given the hegemonic presence of the West in the cultural galaxy of Taiwan and the constant negotiations between the political position vis-à-vis China as well as the cultural imperialism of Japan, the Taiwanese Strawberry Generation finds itself without a particular model of national identity to follow. Along with these are the allegations of widespread corruption and the complete disinterest of the current political parties in the ill-effects of liberalisation (Asian Economic News, 2007) which contribute to a high rate of mental ill-health and suicides in the Strawberry Generation (The China Post, 2008). Given such a murky situation, the Strawberry Generation has indeed withdrawn from active political participation of fighting in the streets and has taken to new forms of expression, which, outside of the context, appear as solipsistic or merely for fun.</p>
<p>Kuso, as an aesthetic then, transcends the analysis of gender and sexuality, performativity and spectatorship, and becomes a site of national representation and subversion and the Kuso stars like the BackDorm boys embody these positions for a Strawberry Generation in Taiwan. The notion of flawed heroism, which simultaneously mocks the ubiquitous presence of the pop-culture from the West, the inability of the local cultural industries to produce original works of art, the apathy of the younger generation caught in the mechanisms of a liberalised globalisation, and the unavailability of spaces for political negotiations that they are built in. This is the defence that many of the Taiwanese and other Chinese speaking individuals produce on the discussions around Kuso. On the discussions on the Sinosplice blog, one of the most vocal defenders, John, who starts with calling this condition, a ‘rare talent’ goes on to say,</p>
<p class="callout">Have you ever tried to make a funny video? It’s much harder than you give these boys credit for. The fact that they were able to do it merely by lip synching is testament to their talent. If they’re using certain cultural expectations for humorous effect, then that’s further evidence of talent.<br />(John, Sinosplice, 2005)</p>
<p>However, John’s idea of ‘playing with cultural expectation’ remains a solitary voice. The other discussants go on to talk about how this particular series is only interesting because of the ‘freak value’ of the videos. Karen, another participant who introduces herself as a student in the West, writes</p>
<p class="callout">I have to reluctantly admit, as politically incorrect and offensive (sic) some of the comments may be, they are mostly valid in my opinion. I’m not saying that the “Back Dormitory Boys’” talent doesn’t play a part in why it’s so funny but the fact that the they’re Chinese with no doubt plays a huge role in the humour that that you could easily find elsewhere. How hard is it to find a few college students making goofball videos and putting them on the internet?<br />(Karen, Sinosplice, 2005)</p>
<p>The opinions that Karen and XiangChang express, resonate with the general perception of the BackDorm boys on many different discussion groups and media talks around the world. As they gained more popularity and exposure, there were more and more people exclaiming at why these antics were being heralded as heroic. However, there were no explanations which were forwarded. The interesting part is that a similar predecessor called the ‘Numa Numa Boy’ (Wolk, 2006), who also had a parodic relationship with the Romanian song, while he gained equal amounts of popularity, was not at the centre of any debate. His claim to fame was slapstick humour and very clearly complied with the Western understanding of parody. However, in the case of the Backdorm Boys, the debates continue as the existing understanding of parody as a universal value fail to account for the aura that surrounds them.</p>
<p>Kuso, as a way of looking at it, offers that the Backdorm Boys were not mere imitators. Imitation would have been in them trying to do a representation of the original Backstreet Boys videos. Instead, the Backdorm Boys are in a world of simulation, where they are simulating the flawed masculinities and identities that are excluded within popular cultures. In this method of simulation, they are able to produce a new and perhaps more believable ‘reality’ which needs to be dealt with in the larger context of the production.</p>
<p>The reason why Kuso makes garbage of things is because that is the only way to deal with the way things are – demolish them, look at their flaws, and find, within those flaws, interstices of negotiation and interaction, which are no longer available. The Kuso, refuses to identify a homogeneous way of understanding digital cinema on the web and insists on thus, contextualising the cultural products through their geo-political status. Because of the geographical origins of digital technologies – the West, and the generally assumed audience and paradigms of understanding it – the West again, most of these new digital cinema forms are looked upon as derivative or engaging in a parodic relationship with the original which is placed in the West. Kuso is a way of complicating the relationship between the two.</p>
<p>This is the first step in thinking about ways in which one can formulate a digital aesthetic which does not presume a homogenised community online but asserts, not only the physical bodies that are behind the production of these narratives but also the geographical boundaries and socio-cultural locations, without which the objects become incomprehensible and indecipherable. Moreover, it is necessary to rescue such ‘popular’ ‘aesthetic’ forms from discussions that confine them to the realms of performance or solipsism and look at the larger potential they have in creating new conditions of political engagement. For Taiwan’s Strawberry Generation, Kuso is a lifestyle, by which they are able to establish discursive and subversive relationships with the very actions and practices which subject them to sever criticism. The wave of new digital cinema, streaming on a screen near us, thus emphasise the need to revisit the relationship between aesthetics and politics on the one hand and the connections between the universal and the contextual on the other.</p>
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<h3>References</h3>
<p>Asian Economic News. 2007. “Thousands Protest Against Taiwan President”. Retrieved on 5th March, 2007 from <a class="external-link" href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0WDP/is_2007_Sept_15/ai_n27465185">http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0WDP/is_2007_Sept_15/ai_n27465185</a><br />Kuan-Hsing, Chen. 2005. “Interview with Kuan-Hsing Chen” by Greert Lovink. Retrieved on 12th March, 2007 from <a class="external-link" href="http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l- 9803/msg00002.html">http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-<br />9803/msg00002.html</a><br />China Post, The. 2008. “Disturbing Suicide Rate Among Young People”. Retrieved on 11th August, 2008 from <a class="external-link" href="http://www.chinapost.com.tw/editorial/taiwan%20issues/2008/08/01/168122/Disturbing-suicide.htm">http://www.chinapost.com.tw/editorial/taiwan%20issues/2008/08/01/168122/Disturbing-suicide.htm</a><br />Fischer, Herve. 2006. The Decline of the Hollywood Empire. Tr. Rhonda Mullins. New York: Talon Books.<br />Full Plate, The. 2008. “Back Dorm Boys: Where are they now?”. Retrieved on 18th March, 2008 from <a class="external-link" href="http://escapetochengdu.wordpress.com/2008/02/24/back-dorm-boyswhere-are-they-now/">http://escapetochengdu.wordpress.com/2008/02/24/back-dorm-boyswhere-are-they-now/<br /></a>Gasser, Urs and John Palfrey. 2008. Born Digital: Understanding the first generation of Digital Natives. New York : Basic Books.<br />Henrry. 2006. Retrieved on 5th March, 2008. from Michel Cheng’s blog for her Writing Class at NCCU, available at <a class="external-link" href="http://nccujuniorwriting.blogspot.com/2006/06/weaknessesof-strawberry-generation_09.html">http://nccujuniorwriting.blogspot.com/2006/06/weaknessesof-strawberry-generation_09.html<br /></a>Ko, Yu-Fen. 2000. “Hello Kitty and the Identity Politics in Taiwan”. Retrieved on 10th January, 2007 from <a class="external-link" href="http://www.international.ucla.edu/cira/paper/TW_Ko.pdf">http://www.international.ucla.edu/cira/paper/TW_Ko.pdf</a><br />Lessig, Lawrence. 2008. “In Defence of Piracy”. The Wall Street Journal retrieved on 11th October 2008, available at <a class="external-link" href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122367645363324303.html?mod=googlenews_wsj">http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122367645363324303.html?mod=googlenews_wsj<br /></a>Liang, Lawrence. Forthcoming. “A brief history of the internet in the 14th and the 15th Century”<br />Lim, Myr. 2006. Retrieved on 5th March, 2008 from her blog titled ‘Wanderlust’ available at <a class="external-link" href="http://myr_fashionstylist.blogs.friendster.com/myr/2006/08/strawberry_gene.html">http://myr_fashionstylist.blogs.friendster.com/myr/2006/08/strawberry_gene.html<br /></a>Mark Mclelland. 2006. “A Short History of Hentai”. Intersections: History and Culture in the Asian Context. Issue 12 http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue12/mclelland.html<br />Marvin, Carolyn.1990. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric communication in the earliest 19th Century. London: Oxford University Press.<br />Mitchell, William J. 1996. City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn. Massachusetts: MIT Press<br />Rachel. 2008. Retrieved on 5th March, 2008 from the National Central University’s (Taiwan) PR Team Page available at <a class="external-link" href="http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2005/10/25/back-dorm-boys">http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2005/10/25/back-dorm-boys</a><br />Yi-Li, Yeh. 2006. KUSO –Red, Spring Snow, Orange Flower. Taipei National University of the Arts, Taipei. Retrieved on 20th November, 2006 from <a class="external-link" href="http://www2.tnua.edu.tw/etnua/modules/news/article.php?storyid=28">http://www2.tnua.edu.tw/etnua/modules/news/article.php?storyid=28</a><br />Sinosplice. 2005. “Backdorm Boys”, a blog entry on a blog. Retrieved on 10th November 2006 from <a class="external-link" href="http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2005/10/25/back-dorm-boys">http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2005/10/25/back-dorm-boys</a><br />Turkle, Sherry. 1996. Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the internet. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.<br />Weinberger, David. 2007. Everything is Miscellaneous The Power of the new digital disorder. New York : Times Books.<br />Wolk, Douglas. 2006. “The Syncher, Not the Synch : The irresistible rise of the Numa Numa Dance”. Retrieved on 10th November, 2007 from <a class="external-link" href="http://www.believermag.com/issues/200606/?read=article_wolk">http://www.believermag.com/issues/200606/?read=article_wolk </a></p>
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<p>[<a name="fn1" href="#fr1">1</a>].A first draft of this article was first presented at the ‘New Cinemas in Asia’ conference organized by the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society at the Christ University, Bangalore. The paper owes its gratitude to S.V. Srinivas for his support both for my journey to Taiwan and for the confidence required to write such an essay on cultures and phenomena that I cannot with confidence claim to be my own.<br />[<a name="fn2" href="#fr2">2</a>]. The Jadavpur University Film and Media Lab, as recently as November 2008, organized a conference to discuss The Future of Celluloid,where, there were many engrossing presentations on what celluloid can mean in the digital age and where its futures reside. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, in his key-note speech, made a significant remark that the Celluloid is the original object that the digital shall always invoke in its manifestation; not merely in its aesthetics, which might change, but in the sheer capacity that the digital has to pay unprecedented attention to the moving image and reconstruct it for new meanings.<br />[<a name="fn3" href="#fr3">3</a>]. Hervé Fischer, in The Decline of The Hollywood Empire, arrives in a long line of prophets who have been announcing the demise and the end of Celluloid Cinema as we know it. Fischer announces, quite early in the book, ‘[d]igital distribution will end this archaic system of distribution and hasten the decline of the Hollywood Empire: Two giant steps forward for film in one fell step!’<br />[<a name="fn4" href="#fr4">4</a>]. The large undivided screen gets replaced by a small ‘Window’ on the right hand corner of the monitor which also houses various other contesting media forms that vie for the users’ attention. Sherry Turkle, in her study of MUD users also talks of how the Window has become a metaphor of our times.<br />[<a name="fn5" href="#fr5">5</a>].In a much more measured tone, Kim Soyoung, in her formulation of a trans-cinema and new public spheres simulated by Korean Cinema, suggests that ‘new digital cinema…attentive to the transformation of its production, distribution and reception modes as shown by independent digital filmmaking and its availability on the net’. She further goes on to propose ‘digital and net, cinema LCD screens (installed in subways, taxis and buses) and gigantic electrified display boards (chonkwangpan in Korean) should be seen as spaces into which cinema theories and criticism should intervene.’ This paper adds to the list, the extremely personalised but virtually public and shared space of the computer monitor and portable media devices.<br />[<a name="fn6" href="#fr6">6</a>]. In another essay exploring the aesthetics of social networking and blogging (especially with the increasing implementation of Web 2.0), I make a claim at these sites being sustained through a constant and incessant production of both the virtual persona of the author as well as the body of the author that serves as an anchor to the virtual reality. I further suggest that this process of continuous translation leads to the self as being recognised and gratified only in a state of performativity over inter-looped surfaces.<br />[<a name="fn7" href="#fr7">7</a>]. Lawrence Liang, in his forthcoming essay, “The History of the Internet from the 15th to the 18th Century”, examines the history of the print and pre-print cultures, to make a brilliant argument around the questions of knowledge, the authority of the knowledge, and the problems of legitimacy or authenticity that have surrounded the Wikipedia in recent years.<br />[<a name="fn8" href="#fr8">8</a>]. The anxiety around such objects primarily circulates around questions of copyright infringements and piracy. The Music And Film Independent Association, for instance, claims that due to the re-mix, unlicensed distribution, and/or re-working of their material, they are suffering a heavy financial loss, leading to ridiculous legal cases that seem to hold no legitimacy in their sense or sensibility. Lawrence Lessig looks at a recent controversy on youtube where a mother, who broadcast digital moving images of her 13 month old son dancing to Prince’s song Let’s go Crazy was accused of copyright violation by the License owners who demanded the withdrawal of the video from YouTube.<br />[<a name="fn9" href="#fr9">9</a>]. In A short History of Hentai, Marc Mclelland, defines Hentai as follows: “Hentai is a Sino-Japanese compound term widely used in modern Japanese to designate a person, action or state that is considered queer or perverse, particularly in a sexual sense. Unlike the English term 'queer', however, hentai does not have predominantly homosexual connotations but can be used to describe any sexual acts or motivations other than what might be termed 'normal' sexual relations. Indeed the loanword nōmaru (normal) is sometimes used as an antonym for hentai. Apart from this general use of the term hentai, it can also be used to designate a specific genre of Japanese manga and animation that features extreme or perverse sexual content and it is in this sense that hentai has become well-known among western fans of Japanese popular culture.”<br />[<a name="fn10" href="#fr10">10</a>]. Professor Yu-Fen Ko (2000) at the Hsih-Shin University in Taipei, locates similar receptions of the ‘Hello Kitty’ phenomenon in Taiwan. Yu-Fen Ko examines how, the larger reception of popular cultural artifacts fail to look at the political potential that these objects have in the way they reconfigure the existing relationship between the personal and the political.<br />[<a name="fn11" href="#fr11">11</a>]. This paper owes great intellectual and emotional debt to many people. Mandy Hua, who, apart from teaching me Chinese, also helped me get introduced to the intricacies of youth fashion and trends in Taiwan. Ted Cheng, who introduced me to many different Kuso objects and helped, whenever my own skills at access or analysis flailed. Amie Parry, Naifei Ding, David Barton, Chen Kuan-Hsing and Josephine Ho who made my stay in Taiwan so fruitful, providing emotional support, and listened to me patiently, correcting me when I was wrong and directing me to people and resources that helped me frame this argument and understand the entire new digital cinema phenomenon in a new light.<br />[<a name="fn12" href="#fr12">12</a>]. After much screening and watching of Indian movie songs from Bollywood, we finally narrowed down to “Kajrare Kajrare” from the movie Bunty aur Bubly, with Aishwarya Rai doing a special dance number.<br />[<a name="fn1" href="#fr13">13</a>]. The particular video can be viewed at <a class="external-link" href="http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=9NlZaDGPEOg">http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=9NlZaDGPEOg</a> The original video that is supposed to make this particular kind of Kuso-streaking is the video which also shot two young men into becoming Television celebrities and can be viewed at http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=0caIbkYfWTY<br />[<a name="fn14" href="#fr14">14</a>]. One of the most popular icons of such consumption is in the popularity of Hello Kitty – a young female cat without a mouth (and hence without speech or the need to eat) - and has elicited much popular discourse. An example of how Hello Kitty is used as a way of also resisting the Western, Disneyfied, Barbie concepts of femininity can be seen in the video available at <a class="external-link" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFBHPbEtfqA">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFBHPbEtfqA</a><br />[<a name="fn15" href="#fr15">15</a>]. LOLCat started as an internet meme which displayed a set of cat pictures, with cheeky captions, parodying ot only the internet slang known as ‘netspeak’ but also reflecting upon how central internet discussions and arguments were to the lives of the digital natives. Some of the most famous examples of LOLCat captions are ‘I can haz cheezburger’, ‘Ceiling Cat’ and then subsequently ‘Basement Cat’. More information and almost an exhaustive range of pictures can be seen at <a class="external-link" href="http://icanhascheezburger.com/">http://icanhascheezburger.com/</a> More interesting LOLCat phenomena also include the under construction LOLCat Bible translation project available at<br /><a class="external-link" href="http://www.lolcatbible.com/">http://www.lolcatbible.com/</a><br />[<a name="fn16" href="#fr16">16</a>]. ‘All your base are belong to us’ started as a successful parody of the obsession with UFO and space travel in the late nineties. The meme borrows this slightly cryptic line from European Sega Mega Drive Version of the video game Zero Wing, where it signified victory and total takeover of enemy territories by aliens, and specializes in putting up the caption on different familiar images taken from contemporary as well as historical times. A large collection of ‘All your base are belong to us’ images can be found at <a class="external-link" href="http://www.allyourbasearebelongtous.com/">http://www.allyourbasearebelongtous.com/</a><br />[<a name="fn17" href="#fr17">17</a>]. A full list of their videos is available to view and download at <a class="external-link" href="http://twochineseboys.blogspot.com/">http://twochineseboys.blogspot.com/</a><br />[<a name="fn18" href="#fr18">18</a>]. A quick glimpse of their popularity can be obtained on fan and internet monitoring sites like <a class="external-link" href="http://www.milkandcookies.com/tag/backdormboys/">http://www.milkandcookies.com/tag/backdormboys/</a> and <a class="external-link" href="http://www.tian.cc/2005/10/asian-backstreetboys.html">http://www.tian.cc/2005/10/asian-backstreetboys.html</a><br />[<a name="fn19" href="#fr19">19</a>]. This trajectory from Reality TV to popular cultural icons is not unfamiliar or new. Various popular shows like American Idol in the USA, Big Brother in the UK, SaReGaMaPa in India, and Kuso Kuso in China, have all spawned instant celebrities who have cashed their media presence and fame to bag roles in featured television programming, cinema, etc. This particular ability of making one’s self popular and recognizable, often by using the internet as a medium for the same, and then penetrating more corporatized and affluent mass media markets, is a ploy that many aspiring media professionals are employing these days.</p>
<p><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/now-streaming-nearest-screen.pdf/view" class="external-link">Click </a>for the <img alt="" /> PDF document, 297 kB (305086 bytes) <br /><a class="external-link" href="http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Article,id=8200/">Click </a>to read the original published in the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Volume 3, Issue 1, June 2009</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/streaming-on-your-nearest-screen'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/streaming-on-your-nearest-screen</a>
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nishant
Internet Governance
Research
2011-12-24T08:58:13Z
Blog Entry
-
Internet and Society in Asia: Challenges and Next Steps
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/internet-society-challenges-next-steps
<b>The ubiquitous presence of internet technologies, in our age of digital revolution, has demanded the attention of various disciplines of study and movements for change around the globe. As more of our environment gets connected to the circuits of the World Wide Web, we witness a significant transformation in the way we understand the politics, mechanics and aesthetics of the world we live in, says Nishant Shah in this peer reviewed essay published in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 11, Number 1, March 2010.</b>
<p>Traces of digital environments and internet technologies are all
around us – we can see them in the rise of Digital Natives who are
increasingly experiencing and living their lives mediated by digital
technologies; we can see them in new forms of social interactions, such
as blogs, peer-to-peer networks, internet relay chat, podcasts and so
on, which are progressively becoming the primary points of information
dissemination and production; we experience them in the tools and
techniques of political mobilisation in large scale democratic elections
and also in sub-cultural and smaller phenomena, such as flash-mobs and
viral networking; we are incessantly reminded of them in the discourse
around questions of safety and danger, especially with reference to
activities such as internet pornography, child sexual abuse, piracy,
identity theft, etc.</p>
<p>Internet technologies have become so intricately entwined with our
daily practices and experiences that it is necessary to seriously look
at these technologised circuits and the technology mediated identities
thus produced. Increasingly, we see many different disciplines extending
their methodologies and perspectives to include cyberspaces and digital
behaviour in their purview. We already have a new breed of
cyber-psychologists who are looking at the interaction between the human
mind, the sense of the self and digital environments. The law, perhaps
most concerned with questions of property, trade and commerce, is also
examining questions of what it means to be human, with the emergence of
post-human categories like cyborgs, cybrids, and genetically modified
life forms. Anthropologists and sociologists have discovered cyberspace
as a site that significantly influences the behaviour and thought of
individuals as well as communities that come into being in the digital
deliriums of the networked world. Feminism and Gender and Sexuality
Studies have found great theoretical and political interest in the ways
in which the internet technologies change the way we understand our
bodies and practices. New disciplines like Robotics, Artificial
Intelligence, Cybernetiques, Cyborg Studies, etc. are slowly garnering
importance and evolving as the spread of digital technologies increases
exponentially. Cybercultures, a discipline (or perhaps, rather, a
combination of various disciplines interested in studying cyberspaces)
that comes into being because of the rise of Internet Technologies, is
now already institutionalised in many universities and research spaces,
concentrating on understanding the complex forms of interaction,
representation and negotiation that happen in the fluid and rapidly
changing landscape of digital cyberspaces.</p>
<p>As Internet Technologies continue to grow and become a more integral
part of our lifestyles, cultural production, and forms of social
transformation and political mobilisation, there are a few challenges
that we face, especially when writing from and about Asia.</p>
<p>Following the trajectory of the development and spread of internet
technologies, academic attention and research has primarily emerged in
the North-West and slowly penetrated through disciplines and contexts in
other parts of the world. It was only after the 1990s, once the digital
revolution reached the ‘rest of the world’, that interest in and
research on the phenomenon started to feature in studies in Asia.
However, the initial research on and the major interest in the
relationship between internet technologies and society has been
dependent upon the theoretical categories, examples or ideas produced in
primarily Western contexts. This has led to the production of a
narrative where the digital technologies of information and
communication (like the internet) are looked at as being seamlessly
exported from the West to the East, without any attention given to the
geo-political contexts and socio-cultural changes that accompany this
penetration of technologies. There has been a blindsiding of the role
that the State, educational institutions and globalised economic powers
have played in the introduction, the proliferation and the acceptance of
the internet technologies and digitally mediated lifestyles that have
become so commonplace in developing Asia today. Research is oblivious to
the context within which these technologies emerge and the kind of
negotiations and interactions they have with the larger social and
cultural fabric of the region.</p>
<p>One of the main reasons why such a narrative gains currency is that
we have no vocabulary but that granted by Western scholars and
practitioners to talk of the technologies and the technologised
socio-cultural productions that emerge in our own local and regional
contexts. With the rhetoric of globalisation and homogenisation on the
one hand and the logic of the universalising nature of internet
technologies on the other, there has been an un-reflexive theorising of
digital identities, productions and interactions; this makes Asia more
an exemplar for the existing Western ideas and hypotheses than a site
where the drama of these technologies is still unfolding. This process
is aided and abetted by the accelerated urbanisation that seeks to
create nondescript and sterile spaces of consumption and lifestyle that
subscribe to the idea of ‘Global’ or ‘Mega’ cities. Hence, across Asia,
we see the mushrooming of cities and city-states – Singapore, Tokyo,
Shanghai, Taipei, Bangalore – that work at actively erasing histories
and producing these bubbles of consumption and globalisation that are
disturbingly similar to each other.</p>
<p>Such theorising also reinforces the disconnect that Western
Cybercultures has been encouraging between the networked worlds and
‘reality’, which, though affected and changed by the rise of these
technologies, still remains strangely continuous and coherent in the
midst of transformations. Moreover, it contains most theoretical and
political interventions within the zones of urban consumption and
change, thus producing a certain middle-class, self-referential work
that concentrates on these areas, forgetting other crises and problems
that still need attention. It also encourages a view of Asia as a
docile, non-agential site upon which technologies are mapped, despite
the fact that every year in this new century has seen Asian countries
emerging as substantial stake-holders and players in production,
proliferation and consumption of internet technologies. Along with the
liberalisation of markets, the global digital revolution has also seen
boundaries in social norms, cultural mores and political processes being
pushed. We have been witness to formerly closed governments attempting
to restructure themselves in the global world and to an unprecedented
inflation and consumption in the developing Asian countries. We are in
the middle of radical reconstruction of academic processes and market
economies as public private partnerships become the norm. However, these
landmark changes are often ignored or explored from a West-centric
view-point, producing extreme and polarised reactions to the spread of
Internet Technologies and the changes it entails.</p>
<h3>Beyond Euphoria and Fear</h3>
<p>Most responses to the widespread reach of internet technologies and
digital forms have been grounded in euphoria or fear. There is a certain
boundless celebration on the one hand, that proclaims the internet as
forming the new public sphere, heralding the democratic potential and
transparent structures that these networks have within them. The gurus
have looked upon the internet in a ‘convergence theory’ mode where they
announce, severally and variously, the death of earlier cultural
productions like books, movies and music. The ability of digital
technologies to aid innovation and creativity, as well as new forms of
employment and entrepreneurship, has spurred the writing of many books
and essays documenting the process. The roles that internet technologies
have played in granting voice, visibility, and expression to many
underprivileged communities, and the way they offer social and economic
mobility in developing countries, have been unabashedly celebrated.
Governments, civil society practitioners and theoreticians have all
looked upon the internet as the panacea that will help level the
landscape of social justice and political participation around the
world.</p>
<p>Simultaneously, there has also been a construction of ‘ecology of
fear’ around the rise and spread of internet technologies. Massive
global alarm exists around questions of easy access to pornography and
other sexual behaviours online, not only for young adults but also for
mature audiences of potential behaviour addicts. Online gambling has
emerged as a huge concern and has been at the centre of much debate.
Cyber-bullying on social networking systems, and cyber-terrorism on a
much larger scale, have shocked us as new technologies get implicated in
actions that have disastrous results both at the individual and the
community level. With the tightening Intellectual Property regimes,
there has also been great debate around digital piracy and the ability
of the internet peer-to-peer networks to encourage acts of theft and
copyright infringement. As the world becomes more digitised, attacks on
sensitive information by crackers and scammers are also on the increase
in various forms. The internet has been looked at with growing concern
and alarm by parents, educators, policy-makers and corporate entities,
who are all deeply involved in assuring safety, creating opportunities
and catering to the needs of citizens and consumers.</p>
<p>This simultaneously celebratory and pathologised approach often
cripples research in the field of Internet and Society, because it
constructs technology mediated practices and identities as at once
universal (hence general) and unique (hence particular). Research that
emerges is, consequently, confined to producing case-studies explaining
what happens in each particular incident online and is unable to examine
either the conditions within which the technologies emerge or the
contexts that circumscribe certain socio-cultural behaviour. Such
research, instead of examining the aesthetics and politics of technology
mediated identities and practices, keeps on documenting the extremely
fluid and rapidly changing landscape of the digital world – documenting
fads, evolutions, innovations and the smaller changes therein – thus
missing the forest for the leaf; the research ends up in concentrating
on the ‘what happened’ rather than treating these happenings as
symptomatic of larger paradigmatic changes that they often hint at.</p>
<h3>Internet and the Convergence Theory</h3>
<p>This is further complicated by the fact that many theorists and
analysts seem to treat the internet more as a platform for convergence
of old media forms in new digital packages. Such a view of internet
technologies and digital cyberspaces leads to the populist descriptions
of blogs as extensions of personal diaries, of digital cinema as a
continuation of the celluloid image, of digitally morphed pictures as
more sophisticated versions of earlier experiments with still images, of
social networking systems as evolution of pre-existing social
structures, of MMORPGs (Massive Multiple Online Role Playing Games) as
merely complex forms of gaming. These descriptions fail to take into
account that internet technologies, especially digital cyberspaces,
while indeed affecting and transforming existing forms of media and
cultural production, also lead to the emergence of new and interesting
forms of expression, consumption and interaction.</p>
<p>Just as the field of Cybercultures has only a vocabulary granted by
the West, it also lacks a vocabulary that is its own – most research in
Cybercultures, especially in emerging information societies, relies on
categories, concepts and ideas that were relevant for earlier popular
cultural forms like books and movies. Transplanting categories of
authorship, production, consumption, distribution, etc., and trying to
map them onto the digital world leads to severe confusion and is a
futile exercise. For example, if we look at the discourse around the
online user generated encyclopaedia – Wikipedia - and use the earlier
existing categories of an author, a reader, an editor and an
institutional structure of producing knowledge, we immediately realise
that the discussion cannot be sustained; the categories presuppose other
forms of writing and production which are not as relevant in the
digital worlds. Similarly, legal categories like possession, ownership,
labour and copying are also being made redundant by the advent of the
internet. As these categories fail to capture the new digital worlds,
they also fail to explain the human-technology relationship that the
field of Internet and Society seeks to explore. Despite investment in
terms of efforts, time and money, much of the research becomes redundant
because it does not have the vocabulary or the idea that analysis of
these new digital spaces entails.</p>
<p>The imagination of the convergent multimedia internet distracts from
the fact that what appear to be earlier historic forms like text and
moving images are, in the context of cyberspace and the Web 2.0
revolution, actually new forms that need their own vocabulary that does
not carry the baggage of earlier popular technologies. It is time to
move away from talking about the Internet and its effects in analogies
and to seek and create an independent and effective language that takes
into account the mechanics and the potentials of the Internet
revolution.</p>
<h3>Institutional Spaces: Internet & Society</h3>
<p>It is within such contexts and to address questions like these that
institutional spaces emerge in the field of Internet and Society. As
more and more disciplines start focusing on internet technologies and
their intersections with areas as diverse as identity, sexuality,
governance, cultural production, political mobilisation and social
transformation, institutions in this space are faced with the daunting
question of what to concentrate on and how to define the scope of their
activities. Many global organisations and interventions narrowly define
the field through their own disciplinary positions and perspectives. The
Berkman Centre of Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School, for
example, examines the law and its intersections with the new internet
technologies and practices. Sarai - a new media organisation in India -
concentrates on art and cultural production as affected by digital
technologies and practices. The Association of Internet Researchers
builds a network of multi-disciplinary researchers and practitioners
across the globe to meet annually for workshops and conferences and also
share ideas through a mailing list, concentrating on existing phenomena
on the World Wide Web. Several Communications and Media Studies schools
also have established labs and workshops that focus on the internet
technologies from their disciplinary grounding.</p>
<p>The Centre for Internet and Society, a newly established research and
advocacy centre founded in Bangalore, India, makes a shift from these
discipline-bound approaches to Internet and Society, and inaugurates a
multi-disciplinary, interactive space for theorists, researchers,
students, practitioners, activists, artists and the larger public to
initiate a dialogue in the field of Internet and Society. Rather than
adopting a disciplinary framework, it takes the model of Asian Cultural
Studies, seeking to produce a sustainable scholarship and methodology to
talk of the relationship between emergent Internet technologies and the
changes they produce in the Global South. It sets out to critically
engage with concerns of digital pluralism, public accountability and new
pedagogic practices through multidisciplinary research, intervention
and collaboration, to understand and affect the shape and form of the
internet and its relationship with the political, cultural, and social
milieu of our times.</p>
<p>At CIS, we recognise the contexts within which this field has
developed and emerged and have initiated many programmes, projects and
structures to deal with the questions that this essay has charted.
Drawing from the pedagogy and frameworks developed within Cultural
Studies in Asia, the research at CIS investigates the local, the
contextual, the emergent and the negotiated nature of digital spaces and
internet technologies at three levels – At the national level, looking
to produce models of research by examining the history, the politics,
the growth and the significance of internet technologies in the context
of globalised India; At the regional level, focusing on the similarities
that global urbanisation and digitisation are bringing to the emerging
information societies in Asia and the acknowledging the dissimilarities
that need to be addressed in each of these societies; At the global
level, engaging with a much larger South-South discourse that
strengthens the move to approach internet technologies as integral to
our ways of living rather than of foreign import. Such an approach
allows us to escape the often restrictive constraints of cybercultures
discourse that stays within the domains of internet technologies and
produces disconnect between Internet and Society. Instead, we expand the
scope of internet technologies to see their relationships with larger
political, social and cultural economies, lifestyles and consumption
patterns, and identity and transformation structures in the rapidly
changing world. In the first two years, for example, we are investing a
large part of our research energies into producing the Histories of the
Internets in India – inviting different disciplines and standpoints to
trace the diverse historically important and culturally significant
growth of Internet Technologies in India, thus de-homogenising the
internet as well as the discourse within cybercultures.</p>
<p>The policy and advocacy work at the Centre for Internet and Society,
also contributes hugely to this localisation and narrativisation of the
internet in India, by recognising the law and the State as the largest
stakeholders in the growth and proliferation of these technologies. We
have initiated campaigns and projects examining national laws regarding
intellectual property rights regimes, piracy, e-commerce and security,
accessibility and disability, to see how they are subject to
modification with the growth of digital technologies. Original field
work and ethnography with the consumers, practitioners, stakeholders and
law enforcers about the nature of technology, its role in the larger
imagination of the globalised Indian State, and the need to make
sensitive and informed decisions, has already been initiated, along with
dissemination platforms like workshops, seminars, meetings and
conferences.</p>
<p>Keeping in tune with our model of collaboration and consultation, the
Society Members have also helped us generate a healthy momentum by
representing us and helping us find resources around the globe. Prof.
Subbiah Arunachalam has been travelling across Asia, Europe and North
America, at international policy and activist forums, promoting Open
Access to information and knowledge. Lawrence Liang has been involved in
teaching both at the local and international levels, apart from
presenting original and influential research examining the relationship
that internet technologies have with questions of knowledge production,
ownership and the law. Achal Prabala has been actively working with the
Wikimedia foundation to facilitate user participation in knowledge
production online. Atul Ramachandran has been working on developing
mobile internet platforms for sharing news and information within the
underprivileged communities in India. Vibodh Parthsarthy has been
designing academic courses and encouraging research in the fields of
internet technologies, governance and democracy.</p>
<p>Because these questions have a much larger regional relevance – with
the increasing description of Asia as the Mecca of piracy and digital
infractions – we are also in the process of starting projects that do a
survey of the laws around intellectual property rights, innovation and
access in the Asian region, with Sunil Abraham (Director – Policy)
guiding a team of in-house researchers and external collaborators.
Cross-boundary research and analysis has also been initiated in terms of
dialogues and comparative study of technology, space and globalisation,
initiated by my seven month residential project in Shanghai, where we
are examining the conditions of technologisation that make global spaces
possible, in countries like China and India. Apart from these, the team
of seven people has been making interventions in international
workshops, conferences and forums, to start dialogues and discussions in
the field of Internet and Society.</p>
<p>A significant effort has been spent in starting awareness for the
public – from the first documentation on our website of work in progress
by our research and policy collaborators to regular contributions to
local media sources to organisation of public talks and events – which
is aimed at demystifying the internet technologies and giving more
ownership and assurance to a larger public. Jimmy Wales, the founder of
Wikipedia, gave a public talk on freedom, expression and the internet,
citing anecdotes and examples from the phenomenal success and growth of
Wikipedia. In a different media, independent film maker Jamie King
screened his movies on the piracy cultures and innovation, in Bangalore,
sparking conversations and debates about copyright, creative commons
and the domain of cultural expression. Students and visiting artists
from different countries, through the Shrishti School of Art Design and
the efforts of Zeenath Hassan, came together at CIS for a discussion on
fear and gender in public space and how digital technologies contribute
to it. The discussion feels timely because only a month later, India saw
the right wing cultural police tyrannising Bangalore and other parts of
Karnataka, by perpetrating acts of brutal violence against women who
they saw as progressive or in defiance of the right wing codes of
decorum and behaviour. CIS was an active part of the ‘Pink Chaddi’ and
‘Reclaim the Night’ campaigneering, mobilising and participation at a
local and national level, as a response to these acts of regressive
violence, using digital environments and platforms to garner support and
‘recruit’ people into showing their protest against such fundamental
ideas and practices.</p>
<p>Moreover, in order to develop and establish a more accessible
vocabulary and understanding both within research, higher education and
practice of internet and society questions, CIS has been investing in
building national and regional networks of scholars, students and
theorists in different disciplines to come and discuss the area. Courses
have been designed and administered for undergraduate, post graduate
and research students, in the disciplines of social sciences, management
and media studies, journalism and communication studies, cultural
studies etc. Networking with institutional and university spaces like
the Centre for Culture, Media and Governance at the Jamia Millia Islamia
in Delhi, Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad, Centre for the
Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, Christ University, Bangalore,
Centre for Media and Culture Studies, at the Tata Institute of Social
Sciences in Mumbai. We are also in conversation with regional spaces
like the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the Shanghai
University, The Open Source Initiative, International Development
Research Centre, Hivos and the Asia Scholarship Foundation in Thailand,
for extending our regional and global networks.</p>
<p>The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, is less than a year
old and has already embarked upon so many different projects, found a
wide range of collaborations, initiated diverse enquiries and has
received the support and interest of a varied and credible list of
organisations. This warm reception and enthused interest, is as much a
sign of the evolving and dynamic nature of collaboration and
consultation in Asia, as it is of the need for interdisciplinary spaces
like The Centre for Internet and Society, in our times. We see our rapid
progress as symptomatic of a much larger need to establish more
institutional spaces that can cater to the widely expanding horizon of
the field of Internet and Society. While it is indeed laudable that
different disciplines have already started showing interest in studying
and analysing these often invisible links between Internet and Society,
it is also now time, to start looking at technology as more than just an
object or platform of study. We can already see how, in the foreseeable
future, the internet technologies are only going to become more
ubiquitous and central to the crucial mechanics of survival and living.
Spaces like CIS help us look at technologies like the internet, as not
merely tools and techniques, but as entwined in the politics, aesthetics
and economies of the time and spaces we live in.</p>
<h3>About the Author</h3>
<p>Nishant Shah is the co-founder and Director for Research at the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.cis-india.org">Centre for Internet and Society</a>, Bangalore. Nishant’s doctoral work examines the construction of
technosocial subjectivities in India, at the intersections of digital
technology, cyborg identities and globalised spaces. Nishant is the
recipient of the Asia Scholarship Foundation’s grant which places him in
Shanghai for a project on IT and the globalisation of Asian cities.</p>
<p>Read the original published by Inter-Asia Cultural Studies <a class="external-link" href="http://www.meworks.net/meworksv2a/meworks/page1.aspx?no=202672&step=1&newsno=19396">here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/internet-society-challenges-next-steps'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/internet-society-challenges-next-steps</a>
</p>
No publisher
nishant
Internet Governance
Research
2011-12-23T05:56:15Z
Blog Entry
-
Spy in the Web
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/spy-in-web
<b>The government’s proposed pre-censorship rules undermine the intelligence of an online user and endanger democracy.</b>
<p>Kapil Sibal’s recent remarks demanding that private social media companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook remove "objectionable" content from their social networks has created a lot of furore. It should not come as a surprise to us that just like any other platform of publication and content creation, several rules and regulations already regulate online content while still respecting our constitutional right for freedom of speech and expression in India.</p>
<p>From terms of services of the different web 2.0 products that seek to moderate "offensive" or "harmful" material to strictly defined punishable offences as defined in the Information Technologies Act, framed by the Government of India, there are various ways by which material that might incite violence, hatred or pain is systemically removed from the digital space. </p>
<p>Largely, this happens silently. Unless you are particularly keen on certain spurious websites, you wouldn’t even realise that there is a list of blacklisted websites that remain inaccessible to us in India. Once in a while, we realise the regulatory nature of state censorship when certain actions come to light. In 2006, the Indian government blocked Blogspot, the popular blogging platform, because they had detected "anti-national" activities by certain groups using the blog.</p>
<p>More recently, India’s first home-grown erotic comic series Savita Bhabhi was banned and taken off its Indian servers, without realising that in the era of cloud-computing, the comic still remains available through different containers and spaces. In both these cases, while one might be able to provide a critique of the Indian government’s attempts at censoring and regulating information, there is reasonable sympathy to the idea that some control on information is possibly a good thing. </p>
<p>It is in the very nature of information to be filtered. I am sure everybody will agree that censoring, controlling and regulating information of certain kinds — involving child pornography, calls for violence and vandalism aimed at insulting and offending vulnerable sections of the society — is probably in the interest of a healthier information society. And hence, one nods one’s head, rather grudgingly at some of the censorship laws (print, TV, internet, et al) and accepts that we need them, at least in principle, if not in execution.</p>
<p>However, what Sibal is asking for is not in the same vein. Censorship laws have always been very cautious of what constitutes "offensive" content and have relied both on the larger opinions of the community as well as the informed expertise of legal bodies to censor information. More often than not, an act of censorship is implemented when certain sections of the society, in their interaction with certain information, find it offensive or insulting and ask for a block. Pre-emptive censorship, the kinds performed by the Central Board of Film Certification, is in service of existing legal infrastructure around production and distribution of information.</p>
<p>Protective guidelines for censoring information, as was recently seen in the Broadcast Editors’ Association’s mandate around not intruding into the privacy of the Bachchan baby and the mother, during the birth of the child, are demonstrably for the protection of a person’s private life.</p>
<p>Sibal’s new calls for censorship against material “that would offend any human being” is separate from all these instances in three ways. First, while Sibal is an important political figure in this country, he is not the lord of information production. Using the power of his office to call for taking down of content that he found offensive (fortunately it did not incite him to violence and moral decrepitude) is undemocratic and possibly extra-legal (as in not within the boundaries of law, but who will bell the cat?). </p>
<p>To ask private companies and use his influence to bully them into curtailing the constitutionally provided freedom of speech and expression is in bad taste. There is enough regulation that could be invoked to seek arbitration between Sibal’s opinion and somebody else’s about how Sonia Gandhi should be represented online.</p>
<p>Second, Sibal might pretend that he is only asking for censorship of online content the way in which we have for other media, but that is a fallacy. What he is advocating is an ethos of pre-censorship, where, even before the material becomes public, it is screened through human agents who, through some divine right would know the right from wrong — read as what the powers to be want and don’t. To override existing regulation and ask for this extra layer of human scrutiny of all information being produced online is the equivalent of certain unnamed people in Mumbai, who, when Mani Ratnam was about to release his film Bombay, asked for a private screening of the film and then recommended some friendly cuts in it.</p>
<p>Third, is perhaps, and I write this with regret, Sibal has undermined the critical intelligence and engagement of the social media’s ardent users. He has fallen into the trap of suggesting that impressionable minds will be easily corrupted if they are introduced to "undesirable" information online, the same information that will apparently not drive human pre-screeners to prurient activities because they will be protected by the mantle of government sanction. Instead of drawing upon the wisdom of crowds, which invites communities and people to flag information that they find offensive and asks for independent arbitration, he has asked for an undemocratic and unconstitutional call for censorship which threatens the very structures of political protest, resistance and dialogue in the country.</p>
<p>If such draconian measures are going to be carried through, we might soon regress to a dystopia where all information is censored, filtered and reshaped only to suit the interests of those in power.</p>
<p>Nishant Shah, Director-Research wrote this article for the Indian Express. It was published on December 18, 2011. The original can be read <a class="external-link" href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/spy-in-the-web/888509/1">here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/spy-in-web'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/spy-in-web</a>
</p>
No publisher
nishant
Freedom of Speech and Expression
Public Accountability
Internet Governance
2012-03-26T06:38:51Z
Blog Entry
-
When the digital spills into the physical
http://editors.cis-india.org/when-digital-spills-into-physical
<b>Nishant Shah, Director-Research, Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru, tells us why flash mobs are an interesting sign of our times, and not just a passing fad.
</b>
<p><strong>What is a flash mob?</strong><br />There are many different forms of flash mobs, if you look at their content. In terms of structure, it has to do with a bunch of people, who are connected to each other by common technologies but don't necessarily know each other, and yet, come together in a public space to perform a set of pre-decided actions. Congregate, Orchestrate and Disperse -- that is the anatomy of a flash-mob. Hence it is different from other kinds of mobilisations, because it is very rare for anybody to know who is the organiser of a flash mob. <br /><br />There are no long speeches, political expositions or agendas used in order to bring people together for a flash mob. Once the brief performance has been done, people don't stay back to form communities and discuss. The word 'flash' draws its inspiration both from 'flash-floods' and 'flash-in-a-pan', both referring to the immanence and suddenness of a flashmob. </p>
<p align="center"><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/copy2_of_copy_of_nishant.jpg/image_preview" alt="nishant" class="image-inline image-inline" title="nishant" /></p>
<p><strong>What is a smart mob? </strong><br />Howard Rheingold coined the term smart mob in a book by the same name. Smart mobs are a more inclusive form of digital technology-based mobilisation. Rheingold uses the term to refer to a series of sharing, collaborative, performative engagements that have emerged around the world, especially with young people using the Internet. The people don't know each other, but through different Peer-to-Peer (p2p) protocols, are able to share their resources towards a particular purpose. So it might be a group of friends who want to dance at the train station, or geeks sharing their idle computing time to search for records of UFOs, or people using location based applications to meet each other in caf ©s and form friendships. Smart mobs are essentially different from flashmobs because they have a specific agenda and are geared towards a longer, sustained and enduring practice of community belonging and building. </p>
<p><strong>What role does the Internet and digital technology play in organising flash mobs?</strong><br />One of the fundamental tenets of flash mobs is the condition of anonymity. The web offers the necessary condition where the intended participant does not have to disclose any personal information. They are able to interact, communicate, receive and share information while giving out nothing more than their email addresses and cellphone numbers. It would have been impossible to think of a flash mob without the use of these technologies because while the postal service would also offer similar conditions (though the physical address is more of an identifier), the flash mob also requires a speed and scale which would otherwise have been impossible in an analogue world.</p>
<p><strong>What is a flash mob best suited to achieve? Is it a form of celebration, a protest, campaign, a quick way to poke fun, or be ironic? </strong><br />I would say the flash mob is a tool — a process that can be deployed for anything that you want. You can use it as a form of celebration or protest. You can also use it to bully somebody, to destroy public property or create conditions of danger. However, that is true of any tool that we use. A hammer, for example, can be used to hit a nail, or hit some one. The flash mob is a symptom of how our digital and physical realities are merging. It uses the aesthetics of p2p, interaction with strangers, gaming elements with more control over the spaces that we occupy, 'avatar'ification which allows for a pseudonymous existence, etc. to organise something in the physical world. And it is these spillages of the digital into the physical (and vice versa) that make flash mobs significantly more interesting than just a passing fad.</p>
<p>MidDay published this interview in their newspaper on 18 December 2011. The original can be read <a class="external-link" href="http://www.mid-day.com/lifestyle/2011/dec/181211-When-the-digital-spills-into-the-physical.htm">here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/when-digital-spills-into-physical'>http://editors.cis-india.org/when-digital-spills-into-physical</a>
</p>
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praskrishna
Internet Governance
2011-12-22T05:42:39Z
News Item
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India's Techies Angered Over Internet Censorship Plan
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/techies-angered-over-censorship
<b>India has the world's largest democracy, and one of the most rambunctious. Millions of its young people are cutting edge when it comes to high-tech. Yet the country is still very conservative by Western standards, and a government minister recently said that offensive material on the web should be removed.</b>
<p>The way it was reported in India, Communications Minister Kapil Sibal started the whole row by assembling the heads of social networking sites at a meeting in his office in New Delhi.</p>
<p>At the time, he was reported to have asked companies, like Google and Facebook, to devise a system to filter through and edit out objectionable material before it could make its way online.</p>
<p>In an interview with the Indian cable channel CNN-IBN, Sibal pointed to
offensive religious content that could cause ethnic or inter-communal
conflict.</p>
<p>"We will defend any citizens' right to freedom of speech until our last
breath. But we don't want this kind of content to be on the social
media," Sibal said in the interview.</p>
<p>India's civil society, and more particularly its very active blogosphere, was outraged.</p>
<p>Pranesh Prakash from the Center for Internet and Society in Bangalore
says even the suggestion of censorship is a dangerous idea. Particularly
if it's done before the content is posted online.</p>
<div class="pullquote"><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/sibal.jpg/image_preview" alt="sibal" class="image-inline image-inline" title="sibal" />Indian Telecommunications Minister Kapil Sibal has said that Internet
giants such as Facebook and Google have ignored his demands screen
derogatory material from their sites, so the government would have to take action on its own.</div>
<p>"Pre-censorship is a very dangerous idea and is also something that actually doesn't happen in countries that are known for censoring the internet," Prakash says. "It will be charting a new path in Internet censorship."</p>
<p>Prakash says the proposal would be impractical, as well as undemocratic. Even with an army of censors, it would impossible to filter through content before it's uploaded, he says.</p>
<p>Stung by the criticism, Kapil Sibal now says he was misunderstood and that it "would be madness" to ask for pre-screening of content on electronic media and social media.</p>
<p>But in that fateful meeting, the Communications Minister also reportedly objected to unflattering portrayals of India's political leaders on the Internet and in Twitter messages. And that idea reinforced concerns that the government was overreaching and muffling dissent.</p>
<p>Censoring hate speech is one thing, but leaving it to the likes of Google to monitor political speech is problematic, says Apar Gupta, an Internet lawyer in New Delhi.</p>
<p>"It may offend you today, it may not cater to your taste, but at the end of the day: is it legal?" says Gupta. "The new proposals are quite a dramatic change, not only in terms of enforcement, but also in terms of what kind of speech it will prohibit."</p>
<p>Up till now, there has been some legal room for the government to censor inflammatory speech. For example, movies in India are subjected to a government censor board that monitors their content before they can be released to the general public. This year, a controversial movie about India's social caste system, was banned in some parts of the country.</p>
<p>But the Internet is less restrictive, says Apar Gupta.</p>
<p>"You can voice your opinion without any social sanctions for your opinions," he says. "So it's been a pressure valve which has allowed a lot of people to let off steam."</p>
<p>But even so, when debate online boils over in India it's the website or search engine that's held responsible. So critics of the proposed restrictions don't see the need for further action.</p>
<p>All this has left Communications Minister Kapil Sibal as something of a hate figure among Internet-savvy Indians. Although he says he's going to be pressing for tighter controls, he has agreed to meet with the Internet companies again.</p>
<p>This article by Elliot Hannon was published in NPR on 20 December 2011. Read the original <a class="external-link" href="http://www.npr.org/2011/12/12/143600310/indias-techies-angered-over-internet-censorship-plan">here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/techies-angered-over-censorship'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/techies-angered-over-censorship</a>
</p>
No publisher
praskrishna
Freedom of Speech and Expression
Public Accountability
Internet Governance
2011-12-22T05:30:09Z
News Item
-
Indecent Proposals
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/indecent-proposals
<b>If Kapil Sibal’s attempts to police net content fructify, it may even lead to a reversal of some of the forward-looking provisions of the Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000. The new proposal, for instance, will reverse Section 79 which protects intermediaries (websites and carriers) from being prosecuted or made liable for any objectionable content published. Says Pranesh Prakash, programme manager, Centre for Internet and Society: “Unfortunately, what Sibal says turns this upside down as they would now be held responsible for e-content.” Sibal wants to monitor content prior to publication.</b>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?279281">The article by Arindam Mukherjee was published in Outlook Magazine on December 19, 2011</a>. Pranesh Prakash was quoted in it.</p>
<p>While there are privacy concerns, any attempt to do real-time monitoring could pose serious legal complications. Says cyber law expert Pavan Duggal: “This proposition could be ultra vires of the Constitution which guarantees fundamental rights under Article 19, which is about freedom of speech and expression subject to reasonable restrictions.” And the reasonable restrictions for monitoring, blocking and interception of internet content are already built into the IT Act.<br /><br />Says Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Chandrasekhar: “If Sibal was really serious about protecting people, he should have read the IT Act that has a section which allows a victim to legally pursue his/her claim of defamation. If Sibal has his way, DoT bureaucrats will decide what content is ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’.”</p>
<div class="pullquote">“If Sibal was really serious, he should have read the IT Act...it has a section on how victims can pursue defamation claims.”</div>
<p>Moreover, the IT Intermediary Guideline Rules, 2011, though still provisional, mandate that once service providers receive instructions, they have to remove objectionable content within 36 hours. The Act also has other specific provisions like Section 69, which provides safeguards for interception, monitoring/decryption of information; Section 69A which gives procedures and safeguards for blocking access of information by the public; Section 69B for monitoring and collecting traffic data or information. There are also provisions for obscenity and defamation, with steep fines prescribed. Following these, the state has blocked 11 websites since ’09</p>
<p>However, what Sibal and his men would have seen is the Act’s inability to act on the content freely flowing in social media sites. Says Duggal: “The IT Act, 2000, was amended in ’08, but doesn’t talk about social media which came up only around that time. There is a need to bring social media within the ambit of the Act. What Sibal is suggesting doesn’t exist anywhere in the world.” Monitoring social media websites would also be a huge challenge as crores of messages and tweets are generated from India everyday.<br /><br />And privacy? Experts say since India does not have dedicated legislation on privacy, the government could escape any attack on that front. Although some privacy elements were added to the IT Act in 2008, its scope is limited and the concept of data privacy is missing. In fact, the law doesn’t even recognise a person’s right to data privacy!.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/indecent-proposals'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/indecent-proposals</a>
</p>
No publisher
praskrishna
Internet Governance
Privacy
2012-02-14T06:13:22Z
News Item
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Censorship — A Death Knell for Freedom of Expression Online
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/internet-censorship
<b>On December 8, 2011, NDTV aired an interesting discussion on internet censorship. Shashi Tharoor, Soli Sorabjee, Shekhar Kapoor, Ken Ghosh and Sunil Abraham participated in this discussion with NDTV's Sonia Singh.</b>
<p>Sunil said that we need to reflect upon the limitations of freedom of expression which was listed out by Soli Sorabjee and then ask the question whether they are the same limitations in the IT Act. If one reads section 66A, one comes to the conclusion that the IT Act places many additional limitations on the freedom of expression (annoying speech, speech harmful to minors, inconvenient speech) and these are limitations that don’t have existing definitions either in the IT Act or any other statute or case laws. </p>
<p>Sunil further said that through section 79 which is the intermediary liability regime, the government places together a private censorship regime. We did some research at CIS. We sent fraudulent take down notices to seven large international and national intermediaries and through our empirical research we can demonstrate that these intermediaries over-comply with these fraudulent take down notices. So there is already (since the amended IT Act and the notification of the Rules in April this year) a huge chilling effect on the internet thanks to post facto censorship and what the minister is now calling for is preemptive or pro-active censorship which is really going to be the death knell for freedom of expression online.</p>
<p><strong>VIDEO</strong></p>
<iframe src="http://blip.tv/play/AYLkg3YA.html" frameborder="0" height="250" width="250"></iframe><embed style="display:none" src="http://a.blip.tv/api.swf#AYLkg3YA" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/internet-censorship'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/internet-censorship</a>
</p>
No publisher
praskrishna
Freedom of Speech and Expression
Internet Governance
2011-12-19T10:12:46Z
News Item
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Free Speech Online in India under Attack?
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/free-speech-online-in-india-under-attack
<b>When the Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Mr. Kapil Sibal suggested pre-censorship for a range of popular online platforms and social networking sites, the suggestion was met by a barrage of criticism, which soon forced him to back down. Yet Sibal’s suggestion is not the only threat to free speech on the Internet in India today. Legislation such as the Intermediary Due Diligence Rules and Cyber Café Rules (also jointly known as the IT Rules) issued in April 2011 is equally dangerous for free speech online.</b>
<p>Achal Prabhala, Anja Kovacs and Lawrence Liang will join Sunil Abraham to discuss in more detail some of the direct threats to freedom of expression online in India today including the larger legal and social context of freedom of expression and censorship, control and resistance in which they have to be understood and the steps that can be taken to ensure that substantive protections for freedom of expression online will be put into place.</p>
<h2>The Speakers</h2>
<h3>Achal Prabhala</h3>
<p>Achal is based in Bangalore, Karnataka. He is a researcher, activist and writer in the areas of access to knowledge and access to medicine besides being a member of the Advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation.</p>
<h3>Anja Kovacs<br /></h3>
<p>Anja works with the Internet Democracy Project, which engages in research and advocacy on the promises and challenges that the Internet poses for democracy and social justice in the developing world.</p>
<h3>Lawrence Liang</h3>
<p>Lawrence is a researcher and lawyer based in Bangalore, who is known for his legal campaigns on issues of public concern. He is a co-founder of the Alternative Law Forum and works on the intersection of law, technology and culture. He has worked closely with filmmakers and artists in a number of anti-censorship campaigns.</p>
<h2>The Moderator</h2>
<h3>Sunil Abraham</h3>
<p>Sunil is the Executive Director of the Centre for Internet and Society, a Bangalore-based non-profit organization. He is also a social entrepreneur and Free Software advocate. He founded Mahiti in 1998 which aims to reduce the cost and complexity of Information and Communication Technology for the Voluntary Sector by using Free Software. <br /><br /><em>This event is jointly organised by the Internet Democracy Project and the Centre for Internet and Society. Join us at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, on Wednesday 21 December, at 5.30 pm.</em></p>
<p><em><strong>VIDEOS</strong><br /></em></p>
<iframe src="http://blip.tv/play/AYLkvTIA.html?p=1" frameborder="0" height="250" width="250"></iframe><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://a.blip.tv/api.swf#AYLkvTIA" style="display:none"></embed>
<iframe src="http://blip.tv/play/AYLkvV8A.html?p=1" frameborder="0" height="250" width="250"></iframe><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://a.blip.tv/api.swf#AYLkvV8A" style="display:none"></embed>
<iframe src="http://blip.tv/play/AYLkvh4A.html?p=1" frameborder="0" height="250" width="250"></iframe><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://a.blip.tv/api.swf#AYLkvh4A" style="display:none"></embed>
<iframe src="http://blip.tv/play/AYLkwCUA.html?p=1" frameborder="0" height="250" width="250"></iframe><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://a.blip.tv/api.swf#AYLkwCUA" style="display:none"></embed>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/free-speech-online-in-india-under-attack'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/free-speech-online-in-india-under-attack</a>
</p>
No publisher
praskrishna
Freedom of Speech and Expression
Public Accountability
Internet Governance
Lecture
Event Type
2012-03-02T03:03:24Z
Event
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Invisible Censorship: How the Government Censors Without Being Seen
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/invisible-censorship
<b>The Indian government wants to censor the Internet without being seen to be censoring the Internet. This article by Pranesh Prakash shows how the government has been able to achieve this through the Information Technology Act and the Intermediary Guidelines Rules it passed in April 2011. It now wants methods of censorship that leave even fewer traces, which is why Mr. Kapil Sibal, Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology talks of Internet 'self-regulation', and has brought about an amendment of the Copyright Act that requires instant removal of content.</b>
<h2>Power of the Internet and Freedom of Expression</h2>
<p>The Internet, as anyone who has ever experienced the wonder of going online would know, is a very different communications platform from any that has existed before. It is the one medium where anybody can directly share their thoughts with billions of other people in an instant. People who would never have any chance of being published in a newspaper now have the opportunity to have a blog and provide their thoughts to the world. This also means that thoughts that many newspapers would decide not to publish can be published online since the Web does not, and more importantly cannot, have any editors to filter content. For many dictatorships, the right of people to freely express their thoughts is something that must be heavily regulated. Unfortunately, we are now faced with the situation where some democratic countries are also trying to do so by censoring the Internet.</p>
<h2>Intermediary Guidelines Rules</h2>
<p>In India, the new <a class="external-link" href="http://www.mit.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/GSR314E_10511%281%29.pdf">'Intermediary Guidelines' Rules</a> and the <a class="external-link" href="http://mit.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/GSR315E_10511%281%29.pdf">Cyber Cafe Rules</a> that have been in effect since April 2011 give not only the government, but all citizens of India, great powers to censor the Internet. These rules, which were made by the Department of Information Technology and not by the Parliament, require that all intermediaries remove content that is 'disparaging', 'relating to... gambling', 'harm minors in any way', to which the user 'does not have rights'. When was the last time you checked wither you had 'rights' to a joke before forwarding it? Did you share a Twitter message containing the term "#IdiotKapilSibal", as thousands of people did a few days ago? Well, that is 'disparaging', and Twitter is required by the new law to block all such content. The government of Sikkim can run advertisements for its PlayWin lottery in newspapers, but under the new law it cannot do so online. As you can see, through these ridiculous examples, the Intermediary Guidelines are very badly thought-out and their drafting is even worse. Worst of all, they are unconstitutional, as they put limits on freedom of speech that contravene <a class="external-link" href="http://lawmin.nic.in/coi/coiason29july08.pdf">Article 19(1)(a) and 19(2) of the Constitution</a>, and do so in a manner that lacks any semblance of due process and fairness.</p>
<h2>Excessive Censoring by Internet Companies</h2>
<p>We, at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, decided to test the censorship powers of the new rules by sending frivolous complaints to a number of intermediaries. Six out of seven intermediaries removed content, including search results listings, on the basis of the most ridiculous complaints. The people whose content was removed were not told, nor was the general public informed that the content was removed. If we hadn't kept track, it would be as though that content never existed. Such censorship existed during Stalin's rule in the Soviet Union. Not even during the Emergency has such censorship ever existed in India. Yet, not only was what the Internet companies did legal under the Intermediary Guideline Rules, but if they had not, they could have been punished for content put up by someone else. That is like punishing the post office for the harmful letters that people may send over post.</p>
<h2>Government Has Powers to Censor and Already Censors<br /></h2>
<p>Currently, the government can either block content by using section 69A of the Information Technology Act (which can be revealed using RTI), or it has to send requests to the Internet companies to get content removed. Google has released statistics of government request for content removal as part of its Transparency Report. While Mr. Sibal uses the examples of communally sensitive material as a reason to force censorship of the Internet, out of the 358 items requested to be removed from January 2011 to June 2011 from Google service by the Indian government (including state governments), only 8 were for hate speech and only 1 was for national security. Instead, 255 items (71 per cent of all requests) were asked to be removed for 'government criticism'. Google, despite the government in India not having the powers to ban government criticism due to the Constitution, complied in 51 per cent of all requests. That means they removed many instances of government criticism as well.</p>
<h2>'Self-Regulation': Undetectable Censorship</h2>
<p>Mr. Sibal's more recent efforts at forcing major Internet companies such as Indiatimes, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, to 'self-regulate' reveals a desire to gain ever greater powers to bypass the IT Act when censoring Internet content that is 'objectionable' (to the government). Mr. Sibal also wants to avoid embarrassing statistics such as that revealed by Google's Transparency Report. He wants Internet companies to 'self-regulate' user-uploaded content, so that the government would never have to send these requests for removal in the first place, nor block sites officially using the IT Act. If the government was indeed sincere about its motives, it would not be talking about 'transparency' and 'dialogue' only after it was exposed in the press that the Department of Information Technology was holding secret talks with Internet companies. Given the clandestine manner in which it sought to bring about these new censorship measures, the motives of the government are suspect. Yet, both Mr. Sibal and Mr. Sachin Pilot have been insisting that the government has no plans of Internet censorship, and Mr. Pilot has made that statement officially in the Lok Sabha. This, thus seems to be an instance of censoring without censorship.</p>
<h2>Backdoor Censorship through Copyright Act</h2>
<p>Further, since the government cannot bring about censorship laws in a straightforward manner, they are trying to do so surreptitiously, through the back door. Mr. Sibal's latest proposed amendment to the Copyright Act, which is before the Rajya Sabha right now, has a provision called section 52(1)(c) by which anyone can send a notice complaining about infringement of his copyright. The Internet company will have to remove the content immediately without question, even if the notice is false or malicious. The sender of false or malicious notices is not penalized. But the Internet company will be penalized if it doesn't remove the content that has been complained about. The complaint need not even be shown to be true before the content is removed. Indeed, anyone can complain about any content, without even having to show that they own the rights to that content. The government seems to be keen to have the power to remove content from the Internet without following any 'due process' or fair procedure. Indeed, it not only wants to give itself this power, but it is keen on giving all individuals this power. <br /><br />It's ultimate effect will be the death of the Internet as we know it. Bid adieu to it while there is still time.</p>
<p><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/invisible-censorship.pdf" class="internal-link" title="Invisible Censorship (Marathi version)">The article was translated to Marathi and featured in Lokmat</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/invisible-censorship'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/invisible-censorship</a>
</p>
No publisher
pranesh
IT Act
Google
Access to Knowledge
Social media
Freedom of Speech and Expression
Intellectual Property Rights
Intermediary Liability
Featured
Internet Governance
Censorship
2012-01-04T08:59:14Z
Blog Entry
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Technological beasts like Facebook, Orkut, YouTube & Google impossible to control
http://editors.cis-india.org/technological-beasts-impossible-to-control
<b>They were places that let you be: to chat with buddies, exchange photos and plan parties. The rules of engagement were loose, voyeurism passed off as curiosity, vanity as sharing and gibes as friendly banter. </b>
<p>Becoming the voice of a generation was never the agenda. Neither was toppling governments or inciting riots. But technological beasts are impossible to tame. And social networking sites (SNWs), made up of millions of lives, have morphed into the most unpredictable monster yet.</p>
<p>What started as online hangouts, have become a melting pot of opinions and ideas. Facebook, Orkut, YouTube and Google+, enjoy power of the collective, bolstered by technology that allows real-time interaction and blurs physical distances. The effect has shaken up the world: Wall Street to West Asia.</p>
<p>But the government ought to have been smarter than to call the biggest social media intermediaries, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, into a closed door meeting and force stricter rules. The news leaked, and the beast became angry. Social network users have gone into a frenzy to protect their rights.</p>
<p>Kapil Sibal, communications minister, held a press conference to highlight the kind of user-content that the government opposes. He clarified the government wants pre-screening not censoring. But SNW followers have paid no heed. For any external control taints the idea of an online hangout.</p>
<p>But one can't wish away perverseness. And Sibal is not completely wrong, there is plenty of it on SNWs. The question is, who should take it down? Users, hosts or the government?</p>
<h3>Extra Rules Not Required</h3>
<p>The country has not been running without cyber laws. So why invent new ones for the social media? "Rules are already in place, the Information Technology Act, 2000 and Information Technology Rules, 2011, which allow anyone, including the government, to take a legal recourse," says Pawan Duggal, advocate in the Supreme Court of India and a cyber law expert. </p>
<p>Section 2(1) of IT Act defines an "intermediary" as any person who on behalf of another person receives, stores or transmits a message or provides any service with respect to that message. By this definition, an intermediary is just a messenger. SNWs, internet service providers and web hosts fall in this category.<br /><br />Changes and additions to the IT laws have already made their job tough. SNWs are responsible for taking down all potentially problematic content as and when requested. There is a time limit too: 36 hours to respond to such a request. If an SNW refuses to do so, it can be dragged to the court as a co-accused.<br /><br />Duggal says that web hosts can be prosecuted if they create unlawful content, incite and encourage unlawful activities, or fail to remove illegal content despite it being brought to their notice. So why does the government suddenly want more rules for them?</p>
<h3>Asking for the Moon <br /></h3>
<p>No one's denying the need for regulation. And SNWs have good regulators: millions of users. If even one finds a post offensive, he or she can report abuse. The nomenclature may be different, but every host of user-generated content has this option.</p>
<p>The problem is there's no scale to measure what offends sensibilities. There's a list of items that are considered illegal but they are not defined. For instance, "harmful to minors", makes the cut, but what qualifies as harmful is unclear. Even pornography is not defined by Indian laws.<br /><br />This is why the government may not be wrong to be on tenterhooks. But its solution to the problem is untenable: both conceptually and technologically. "A pre-screening mechanism is not impossible. Tools and algorithms to monitor social media content are constantly evolving. But considering the scale of FB, YouTube, Twitter, etc, it will definitely affect real-time interaction," says Shree Parthasarathy, senior director, enterprise risk services, Deloitte, a consultancy.<br /><br />Numbers corroborate the view. In India itself, there are almost 43 million users on Facebook, 3.6 million on Google Plus and 3.5 million on Twitter. Worldwide, YouTube uploads more than 48 hours of video every minute. Imagine an army of employees monitoring each post by referring to a catalogue of words considered unacceptable and a repository of images that are deemed inappropriate or offensive.<br /><br />"The question is not whether it's possible but whether it's appropriate. Such a move will require extensive investment in infrastructure," says Parthasarathy.</p>
<p>Advith Dhuddu, founder of AliveNow.in, a social media firm based in Bangalore, says: "Technology doesn't understand sentiments or sarcasm. It won't distinguish between a porn clip or a video on sex education." Further, even if India decides to monitor content within the subcontinent, it cannot control what's created outside of the country.</p>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/socialmedia.jpg/image_preview" alt="Social Media" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Social Media" /></p>
<h3>Anti-intermediary Legacy <br /></h3>
<p>India has never been a favourite among web hosts. IT laws here have always been stricter than in the West and despite amendments, the burden of responsibility on intermediaries is high. "If pre-screening kicks in, web hosts will not be able to claim they did not know about any contentious material on their sites as they will have a seal of approval. This will undermine the sites' legal immunity, a big worry for web hosts," says Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS). </p>
<p>Outside India, there's differential treatment for different kinds of intermediaries, the principles of natural justice are implemented and there are options for counter notices and notifications. For instance, in Brazil, as per a draft bill, if someone sends three fraudulent take-down notices, he will not be allowed to send a take-down notice again for a year.<br /><br />Before 2008, things in India were worse. Intermediaries were liable for their user's content. This led to the arrest of Bazee.com chief, Avnish Bajaj, in connection with the sale of the infamous DPS Noida MMS clip CD on the website.<br /><br />Post the Bazee.com fiasco, IT laws have been amended. But according to Abraham, "There is still no principle of natural justice, no differentiation between different types of intermediaries and no penalty for abusing."</p>
<p>No wonder social media is over cautious. An unpublished report by the CIS claims intermediaries err on the side of caution and "overcomply" when take-down notices are sent. The researcher sent fraudulent notices to seven intermediaries, including prominent search engines and hosts, identifying specific user-generated material as offensive.<br /><br />"Of the seven intermediaries to which take-down notices were sent, six over-complied...Not all intermediaries have sufficient legal competence or resources to deliberate on the legality of an expression, as a result of which, intermediaries have a tendency to err on the side of caution," says the report.</p>
<h3>No Muzzle, Just Checks <br /></h3>
<p>The bottom line is: government control will take the fun away from SNWs. Imagine an invisible monitoring authority checking out pictures of a party before your friends and family can. It is creepy. It also hints at repression, of the kind China specialises in. No thank you, we are not competing in this department.<br /><br />Some people believe the government doesn't intend to censor SNWs, it just goofed up on the communication. "Sibal is right in saying that obscenity in real and cyber space is the same. He bungles when he puts an insult to the Prophet, Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh in the same bracket. Had he put the debate in a different form, citizens might have appreciated that he's desperately trying to do a good job," says sociologist Shiv Vishwanathan.<br /><br />If that's true, government officials can start a page: "I like social networks". That is a language we all understand. </p>
<p>This article by Sunanda Poduwal & Kamya Jaiswal was published in the Economic Times on December 11, 2012. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this. Read the original <a class="external-link" href="http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011-12-11/news/30502413_1_social-media-technological-beasts-kapil-sibal">here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/technological-beasts-impossible-to-control'>http://editors.cis-india.org/technological-beasts-impossible-to-control</a>
</p>
No publisher
praskrishna
Internet Governance
2011-12-13T03:25:03Z
News Item
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Caught in the Web
http://editors.cis-india.org/caught-in-web
<b>Do we need a cyber Big Brother watching us? A look at both sides of the coin.</b>
<p>In the summer of 2009, a hue and cry was raised by netizens when the Government blocked a hugely popular adult-oriented cartoon site called Savitabhabhi.com. The site was blocked after complaints that Savita Bhabhi's lurid tales were highly offending to the sensibilities of those grounded in Indian traditions. Those who opposed the move said that this was done without granting the creators an opportunity to defend their right to freedom of expression.<br />Recent ruffles<br /><br />A similar brouhaha erupted recently when Communication and IT Minister Kapil Sibal, in a hurriedly called press conference, announced that the Government will bring in a law to pre-filter content posted on social networking Web sites. The trigger for this was certain pictures, with religious connotations, uploaded on various social networking sites including Facebook and Google Plus. Sibal claims that despite Government appeals the Web site refused to remove the content. If the new law is implemented, your status updates or videos will be screened by the internet company for objectionable content before it is published.<br /><br />The move has angered Internet users, promoters of free speech and social networking companies. “As it is the status of freedom of speech in India is in a bad shape. Sibal's new rules will only make it worse,” says Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet and Society.<br /><br />Abraham's point is buttressed by a report from the United Nations Democracy Fund called ‘Freedom on the Net 2011' which gives Indian Internet usage a “partly free” status clubbed along with the likes of Egypt, Jordan, Rwanda and Venezuela.<br /><br />“Pressure on private intermediaries to remove certain information in compliance with administrative censorship orders has increased since late 2009, with the implementation of the amended IT Act. While some observers acknowledge that incendiary online content could pose a real risk of violence, particularly given India's history of periodic communal strife, press freedom and civil liberties advocates have raised concerns over the far-reaching scope of the IT Act, its potential chilling effect, and the possibility that the authorities could abuse it to suppress political speech,” the report says.<br />User content removal<br /><br />When Google began reporting government requests for data and content removal in early 2010, India ranked third in the world for removal requests and fourth for data requests. Between July 1, 2009, and December 31, 2009, India had submitted 142 removal requests. By June 2011, the Internet search giant received requests from the Indian government to remove 358 items. In a breakdown of reasons for such requests, 255 items were classified under the “government criticism” category. In May 2008, two men were arrested and charged for posting derogatory comments about Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi on Orkut. There are many other instances of Government intervention over the past 3 years.<br /><br />Those who support monitoring argue that content on social media network should be scanned because the users are not responsible enough. California-based media commentator Andrew Keen blames the Internet users in a book called The Cult of the Amateur where he writes that technology has fostered a “dictatorship of idiots”. “.....the masses are liable to be further vulgarised by the overwhelming surfeit of their own voluntary contributions, which are inherently without value (otherwise they wouldn't have been offered freely). Without cultural elites empowered to control public discourse and deify their chosen superstars, the monkeys are running the show,” Keen declares.<br /><br />Abraham says this argument is flawed because there is no empirical evidence to determine that people use the Internet for a single purpose. “There is no cause and effect here. People may use the Internet for anything ranging from pornography to science. One cannot generalise user behaviour. If Internet was a tool for the Egypt uprising, the same may not work in some other country,” says Abraham.<br />Monitoring issues<br /><br />Then there are others who want the social network Web sites to take some responsibility. Rajesh Chharia, President of the Internet Service Providers Association thinks that multi-national Internet firms cannot get away by saying that they conform to standards of their country alone.<br /><br />But experts feel that it is practically impossible for any social networking Web site to monitor everything that's posted on their site due to sheer volume. For instance, YouTube has 48 hours of videos uploaded every minute and Facebook has 38 million users in India posting thousands of pictures and messages every day. “The Internet is like a sea, you just cannot control everything that's thrown into it unless you man the entire coastline. Even if you block someone from posting content on one site, they will find another way to get in,” said one of major Internet firms.<br /><br />Meanwhile the Savita Bhabhi site is back with all new content at a new address. So much for the Government's desire to monitor the Internet.</p>
<p>This article by Thomas K Thomas was published in the Hindu Business Line. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this article. Read the original <a class="external-link" href="http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/features/eworld/article2704496.ece?ref=wl_features">here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/caught-in-web'>http://editors.cis-india.org/caught-in-web</a>
</p>
No publisher
praskrishna
Internet Governance
Privacy
2011-12-12T15:32:28Z
News Item