Centre for Internet and Society

Darshana

praskrishna — 2012-04-11T11:18:14Z

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Dark waders

praskrishna — 2011-04-20T05:22:10Z

Akhila Seetharaman finds out why a group of artists and researchers are preoccupied with chasing shadows. This article was published in Time Out Bengaluru, Vol. 3, Issue 20, April 15 - 28, 2011.

The New Bharat Brass Band from Kalasipalayam performed an unusual ditty at the Chitrakala Parishat last month. In a typical concert, the band plays raucous renditions of the latest hit Hindi film songs, but the music at this gig had its origin in a database of photographs of the city. These images had been taken by a group of student-artists, who converted the visual data into binary codes of 0s and 1s, and then transcribed the codes into musical notation, which they asked the band to perform. The result: strange, random, almost robotic music which represented a uniquely distilled experience of the city, peppered with the band’s characteristic filmy flourishes.

This performance was one among the several experimental art projects developed by participants as part of the Space the Final Frontier project, an initiative by the Dutch Art Institute and Centre for Experimental Media Arts at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology to get students to – as described in a introduction to the project – articulate “spaces of flux” and “index the shadow worlds” of the city.

“When we speak about mapping the city, we immediately think in terms of physical geography. We don’t usually approach it in an aesthetic or theoretical way,” said Deepak DL, an art student from Chitrakala Parishat who participated in the two-week programme. His group chose to map shadow sounds – birds, buses on the street, sounds from a bar, and pressure cookers whistling in homes – piecing together an aural landscape of the city. “This project was about mapping the non-spaces. For instance when you go to a restaurant, you rarely see what’s going on behind the wall in the kitchen. We tried to do just that using sound,” said Deepak.

“Wherever there is light, there is also shadow. For all the spaces getting attention, there are many more spaces not getting attention, but surviving and often thriving,” said Prayas Abhinav, faculty member and researcher at CEMA and one of the organisers of Space the Final Frontier. In collaboration with Renée Ridgeway, founder of an online platform for art activities called n.e.w.s., and a third collaborator Stephen Wright, Abhinav is currently working on a book which examines the distribution of human attention in the art world, based on a concept known as “attention economy”.

The trio’s fascination with the theme also led them to hunt for shadow art activities on the internet. In the course of their search they found themselves wondering how to find art online without necessarily limiting themselves to work that described itself as “art”. For Abhinav and his colleagues this became more than a technical problem, since search engines assume that users are looking for what others are looking for and throw up the most popular or valid entries first, leaving the vast majority of less popular entries in the shadow. “Lesser known artists don’t refer to themselves as ‘lesser known artists’, so finding them online via Google isn’t all that easy,” said Abhinav. “Everyone is operating in the same space with established hierarchies. Shadows exist, but how do we look for them?”

“In the 1990s we used to have a culture of community web sites that looked really bad, but were thriving hubs,” said Abhinav. He pointed out that over the decade, with the advent of search engines, the larger databases gained priority among users. To democratise search results, Abhinav and Ridgeway, along with the Centre for Internet and Society, launched the Shadow Search Project with an open call for entries in early 2010 to find an algorithm that could bring up entries that otherwise exist under the radar, through search.

“If the new currency is attention – that is, if users are supposed to pay not money but time –, certain kinds of priorities are set up and vast amounts of information will always remain invisible,” said Nishant Shah, researcher at the Centre for Internet and Society. The Shadow Search Project is intended to serve as a platform to look for these shadows and give them visibility.

The winning entry, a search engine called Narcissus, which will be demonstrated this fortnight, takes the search results of a regular search engine like Google and reverses it, such that the user gets the last page first. “The least popular results come up first, and as those become more popular, the new least popular results come up. This continues in a cyclical manner,” said Ridgeway.

Data gathered and indexed by students during the Space the Final Frontier programme will be used to test the Narcissus algorithm. “If one of the strengths of the Internet is serendipity – stumbling upon a small, but great find by chance – the idea of a search engine plug in like Narcissus that scrambles Google results and presents it in a democratic manner, definitely has appeal,” said Shah.

Read the original in Time Out Bengaluru here

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Dark days for the creative class in India: Siddiqui

praskrishna — 2014-02-17T09:14:43Z

As India’s literacy rate improves, governments, courts, media, publishers and big business are all stifling free speech.

Haroon Siddiqui's article was published in thestar.com on February 16, 2014. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

In contrast to North America and Europe, India’s book publishers, newspapers and TV/radio stations are doing well, thanks to a rising literacy rate and a growing middle class. Authors, artists, journalists and filmmakers are enjoying big audiences and relatively good paycheques. Yet, paradoxically, free speech has never been so imperilled in the world’s largest democracy, for several reasons.

Governments are using colonial-era laws to stifle free speech. The lower courts and police are caving in to religious bigots who demand bans on what they don’t want to see and hear. Vigilante groups are using goon tactics to intimidate the creative class. Big business is slapping lawsuits and creating libel chill. Publishing houses are capitulating to legal, political and economic pressure. The media are too busy mollycoddling governments and advertisers to stand up for free speech.

Legal framework

The constitution guarantees free speech but, as in Canada and several European nations, it also imposes “reasonable restrictions” to maintain peace and public order. The Supreme Court has set a high bar for imposing any restrictions, yet both the federal and state governments routinely shut down anything that might flare communal riots, especially between Hindus and Muslims — a real and ever-present danger. Politicians don’t want blood on their hands to uphold the right of a preening writer to poke people in the eye. Critics counter that the political class doesn’t really care for intellectual freedom.

Libel and defamation laws criminalize speech and prescribe jail terms. This, again, is not much different than, say, the Canadian Criminal Code, under which those convicted of hate speech may be jailed for up to three years. (That’s what we are left with after the Stephen Harper Conservatives axed the civilian remedy that was available under the Human Rights Act.)

India’s Anti-Sedition Act prohibits words and actions that may cause “hatred or contempt or disaffection” toward government. This is used even against journalists, activists and those protesting government policies. As many as 6,000 farmers and fishermen were charged for opposing a nuclear plant along the southeast coast.

The Penal Code makes it an offence, punishable by up to three years in jail, to hurt anyone’s religious sensibilities; promote enmity between different religious groups; circulate “any statement or report containing rumour or alarming news with intent to create or promote, or which is likely to create or promote, on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, caste or community feelings of enmity,” etc., etc.

Worse, the code allows anyone offended by anything to demand that the offensive material be removed.

Indians are easily offended, indeed are “desperate to be offended,” jokes novelist Manu Joseph. The milieu allows religious leaders and politicians to stoke real or imagined grievances and rush to the courts and the police, both of which usually cave in rather than risk the wrath of frenzied protesters.

“Instead of protecting the right of free expression, the state defends the offended,” writes Salil Tripathi on the website Index on Censorship.

Adds Kian Ganz, editor of the website Legally India: “Many of these British-colonial laws were written and enforced to ‘control’ a multi-ethnic and religious population. Yet they are still around and are regularly used to stifle free speech.”

Religious bigotry

While we hear mostly of angry Muslims taking offence to alleged insults to Islam — the 1988 ban on Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses being the prime example — increasingly it is Hindu fundamentalists who have been agitating successfully against what they do not like.

“Hindu bigots have matched, or perhaps even outperformed, their Islamic counterparts,” writes Ramachandra Guha, India’s pre-eminent historian. He was condemning Penguin India’s decision last week to recall and pulp American academic Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: an Alternative History, under pressure from a Hindu group that said the 2009 book contained “heresies” and was focused on “sex and eroticism.”

There has been no bigger victim of Hindu wrath than the late M.F. Hussain, the “Picasso of India.” His priceless work was vandalized, he was slapped with hundreds of lawsuits and threatened with death for painting Hindu deities in the nude. He went into exile in Doha, Qatar, where I spoke to him on the phone in 2011 and heard his pain at having been hounded out of his beloved India. We agreed to meet later but he died soon after, at age 95.

Last year, India’s leading intellectual Ashish Nandy was threatened with arrest for ostensibly offending Dalits (Hindus of a lower caste, formerly known as untouchables).

In 2012, Mumbai police arrested a young woman who complained on Facebook about the shutdown of the city of 18 million on the death of Bal Thackeray, leader of a chauvinist regional Hindu party. Another woman who “liked” the page was also detained,both for “hurting religious sentiments.”

In 2011, the western state of Gujarat stopped the sale of American journalist Joseph Lelyveld’s biography of Mahatma Gandhi, which suggested that the great leader may have had a sexual relationship with a male German architect. The chief minister (premier), Narendra Modi, is now the prime ministerial candidate of the Hindu nationalist Bharata Janata Party for federal elections in May, which he is favoured to win.

In 2010, Canadian author Rohinton Mistry’s 1995 book, A Fine Balance, was removed from the syllabus of Bombay University, his alma mater, following objections by a student, the grandson of Thackeray. The head of the university’s English Department had to go into hiding after receiving death threats.

In 2008, Delhi University expunged from its history course an essay by A.K. Ramanujam on Hinduism following complaints by a Hindu group, and Oxford University Press India temporarily stopped printing it.

Other examples:

In 2007, a court issued an arrest warrant for actor Richard Gere for kissing Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty, following complaints by irate Hindus. An institute in the western city of Pune was vandalized because American academic James Laine had done part of his research there for his book, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India. An art gallery in Bangalore hastily removed partially nude pictures of Hindu deities fearing retaliation by a Hindu moral squad.

Guha, the historian, once suggested that both Rushdie and Hussain, one pilloried by Muslims and the other by Hindus, be conferred India’s highest civilian honours. “That would have been a blow for artistic freedom. And it’d have equally offended Hindu and Islamic bigots.”

Libel chill

There has been a steady rise in what free speech advocates see as nuisance lawsuits by corporate houses, businessmen and political parties.

In December, Jitender Bhargava, executive director of Air India until 2010, saw his book on the national airline withdrawn by Bloomsbury India, allegedly under political pressure.

The same month, another book, Sahara: The Untold Story, on the controversial finance and real estate conglomerate, was held back under a court order.

In 2011, Penguin removed a chapter in The Beautiful and the Damned from its Indian edition after Arindam Chaudhuri, who runs business schools, sued about his profile in it. He also sued Caravan, a journal of politics and culture, for an article on how he had “made a fortune off the aspirations and insecurities of India’s middle class.” The Delhi-based businessman still has the Delhi-based magazine entangled in the case he filed in a jurisdiction 1,750 kilometres away — and 300 kilometres from the nearest airport.

Penguin also held back a biography of J. Jayalalithaa, chief minister of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, who had a stay order issued against it.

In 1998, a book about the head of a textile conglomerate, Dhirubhai Ambani, was not published in India after the publisher was threatened with lawsuits. A second edition of The Polyester Prince was issued in India but with the offending material cut out.

It is difficult for outsiders, especially without the benefit of reading the materials in dispute, to judge the timidity of the publishers. But there’s no questioning the creeping self-censorship.

Obeisant media

Vinod Jose, executive editor of Caravan, writes in its annual media issue:

“Media owners bargained with the government to secure lucrative licences to mine coal blocks in return for their power to influence the public. Editors got caught on tape striking deals with lobbyists but remained arrogantly unapologetic. Owners fired political editors who wrote about politics independently . . . Forbes India pulled a story because it irked the finance ministry.”

Jose said that in 2013, the year surveyed, “the dominant mood of the press was docility.” If in the 1950s and 1960s, the media served the state, now they serve big business. They have begun to expose government corruption but remain mostly mum on corporate malfeasance. The Times of India, the country’s largest English daily, takes equity in some companies it provides advertising space to.

State surveillance

India, like the United States and other democracies, is under heavy criticism for invasion of citizen privacy under sweeping state surveillance, especially by its eight intelligence agencies that operate under mostly secretive powers.

“The real problem is that we don’t know what powers they do have — we only know bits and pieces about the Centralised Monitoring System (CMS), from some tender documents that indicate that the government intends to track web usage, phone calls, text messages and map location information, apparently without the knowledge of even telecom operators,” says Nikhil Pahwa of MediaNama (Media Journal), a website that provides news and analysis of digital media. “The issue is even less obvious here than that of the NSA,” the National Security Agency in the United States.

“The rules give the Indian government the ability to gag free speech, and block any website it deems fit, without publicly disclosing why or who blocked it — or providing adequate recourse for getting the block removed.”

“Intelligence agencies are not answerable to parliament, only to the Home ministry,” says Anja Kovacs of the Centre for Internet and Society. There are few checks and balances, little or no civilian oversight.

“The Indian government’s centralized monitoring is chilling, given its reckless and irresponsible use of the sedition and Internet laws,” says Human Rights Watch. “New surveillance capabilities have been used . . . to target critics, journalists and human rights activists.”

“Every month at the federal level, 7,000 to 9,000 phone taps are authorized or re-authorized,” writes Pranesh Prakash, policy director for the Centre for Internet and Society.

Conclusion

It is useful to remember that whatever is true of India, the exact opposite may also be true. So, while the situation is getting bleaker on the free speech front, in India the state is not the sole culprit, unlike in Russia, China or other authoritarian places. India also has a vibrant civil society that’s hammering away — is free to hammer away — at the need for a liberal polity to be liberal. The intellectuals, activists and NGOs I have quoted, testify to that. Here’s another:

The PEN All-India Centre in Mumbai and the newly formed Delhi Pen, both part of the global network of writers dedicated to free speech, said this last week:

“The removal of books from our bookshops, bookshelves and libraries, whether through state-sanctioned censorship, private vigilante action or publisher capitulation are all egregious violations of free speech that we shall oppose in all forms at all times.”

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Dariusz Kloza

praskrishna — 2013-07-29T04:51:39Z

Dariusz Kloza

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Danish

praskrishna — 2012-01-28T09:04:43Z

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Daniel

praskrishna — 2013-07-22T07:11:09Z

Daniel Dantas

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Dainik Jagran

praskrishna — 2016-01-13T02:35:39Z

Dainik Jagran

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Daily Traffic

praskrishna — 2013-03-31T03:00:22Z

Daily Traffic

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Daily Traffic

praskrishna — 2013-03-31T02:59:34Z

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Dadri reopens debate on online hate speech

praskrishna — 2015-10-11T05:42:02Z

The friction between free speech and hate speech has become newly intense because of social media. Twitter reflected the turmoil after the lynching of Mohammed Akhlaq in Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, when some tweets justified the murder as a legitimate reaction against cow-slaughter, trending the hashtag #cowmurderers.

The article by Amulya Gopalakrishnan was published in the Times of India on October 9, 2015. Pranesh Prakash gave inputs.

"Jo bhi gau ka mans khaye, use aur uske parivar ko turant maar do (those who eat beef should be killed along with their families)" is just one example of the kind of tweets that got an FIR filed against the handle. The UP police also booked a person for spreading inflammatory rumours about cow-smugglers killing a police officer.

Their comrades immediately alleged censorship, and various profiles with pictures of weapon-brandishing deities rallied under hashtags of support. Taslima Nasreen summed up their grievance, claiming that "free speech allows hate tweets".

There are, of course reasonable restrictions to free speech when it looks likely to spiral into violence, what a 1989 Supreme Court judgment called a "spark in a powder keg" situation. The IPC has Section 153A, 153B, 295 and 505 and more, which curb speech that promotes enmity between groups on the basis of religion, race, place, birth or language, defiles places of worship, insults religious sentiments, creates public mischief and so on. But social media presents an almost daily dilemma, and makes it clear that it is time for more discriminating decisions on what kinds of extreme speech can be gagged. As the SC judgment knocking down the over-broad Section 66A of the IT Act noted, discussion and advocacy , however, hateful or prejudiced, are not incitement.

All hate speech seeks to sharpen tensions, but not all such speech is equally damaging. As Pranesh Prakash, policy director of the Centre for Internet and Society , Bangalore, puts it, "freedom of speech operates within fields of power".Hate speech either aims to taunt and diminish a minority, or tell others in an in-group that their feelings are shared.Different countries make their own judgment calls as they balance these two values, both fundamental to a democracy: free expression and the defence of human dignity and inclusion.

Internet intermediaries, ISPs or powerful private corporations like Twitter and Facebook, have to comply with court orders and official government requests, but they are not always on the same page about unacceptable content. For a company like Twitter, for instance, the need to preserve individual voices, however discordant, is more valuable than the need to create a more perfect public sphere. It advised offended users to simply block controversial content, though recently , it has begun to consider "direct, repeated attacks on an individual" a potential violation too.

Susan Benesch, of Harvard University's Berkman Center, has suggested a framework to identify a dangerous speech act, which factors in the profile of the speaker, the emotional state of the audience, the content of the speech itself as a call to action, the social context in which it occurs, and the means used to spread it.

The UP police has a social media lab to track and scotch rumours. "That's how we recently busted a false story about a khap panchayat ordering gangrapes," says a UP police official who did not wish to be named. Rather than appealing to the social media company for takedowns -an onerous process, and one where provocations are often difficult to explain -it is easier to find and deal with the source of the content, he says. One can identify problematic material either by location or keywords, says Ponnurangam K, assistant professor at IIIT, Delhi, who has developed the social network analytics tool used by UP police. Given the speed and scale of the internet and the volume of user-generated content, legal curbs cannot be invoked for every instance of hate speech. "It is far more feasible to monitor these rumours and take preventive action on the ground, where the harm is likely to be felt, and to use the same medium to counter the rumours with truth," says Prakash. Social media was assumed to have responsible for spreading the 2011 riots in the UK, but it turned out to be even more effective in stemming the contagion, righting rumours and helping law enforcers.

During the 2013 general election in Kenya, the Umati project trawled social media for trending hate content and tried to counter its effects by exposing and shunning those advocating violence. A repository called Hatebase tries to identify local words and phrases that indicate brewing trouble, to make it easier to find the active signals of threat from the low-level hum -repeated references to cow meat in India, or "sakkiliya", a Sinhala word to disparage Tamils in Sri Lanka.

"The government should work with platforms to find the nodes of dangerous speech, to counter them, and support campaigns for those victimised," says Chinmayi Arun, research director of the Centre for Communication Governance at the National Law University, Delhi, who is leading a three-year project on online hate speech, in collaboration with the Berkman Center.

It is far more effective to boost media literacy, help people sniff out bias and propaganda, understand how photos can be morphed and fake videos passed off as real. "Law enforcers need the imagination and patience to develop these strategies, rather than try to censor controversial speech wherever possible," she says.

Of course, when IT cells of political parties are the fount of the most of these excitable handles, that's easier said than done.

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D:coding Digital Natives - Seminar with Nishant Shah

praskrishna — 2013-03-06T05:21:27Z

Nishant Shah gave a talk on D:coding Digital Natives at Samhällsvetarhuset on February 26, 2013, from 1.15 p.m. to 3.00 p.m. The event was organized by HUMlab.

Read the original published by HUMlab.

Abstract

The discourse around youth-technology-change - digital natives, if you will - has been shaped by self explanatory buzzwords like participation, collaboration, mobilization etc. These words seem to hold a promise of revolutions and change without actually acknowledging material practices or complex relationships that young people have with technologies and visions of change. Trying to decode these words through case-studies from the Global South, this talk hopes to offer new frameworks through which digital natives can be studied and understood in emerging ICT contexts.

Bio:
Nishant Shah is the co-founder and director of research at the Bangalore-based research organization Centre for Internet and Society. He studies questions of governance, identity, planning and body at the intersections of digital technologies, law and everyday cultural practice.

He is a visiting researcher at the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University, Germany, and an International Knowledge Partner on 'Youth, Technology and Change' with Hivos, Netherlands. He recently co-edited the four-volume book series "Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?" that captures discourse, practice and policy as it shapes and is shaped by youth driven, everyday practices of digital technologies and is currently working on looking at civic action in networked societies.

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D:Coding Digital Natives

praskrishna — 2015-05-08T12:30:14Z

Nishant Shah was invited for a public talk at the University of California, Los Angeles. He presented the work done on Digital Natives and spoke about questions of participation and resistance. The talk has been featured in the YouTube channel.

Nishant spoke about the ways by which technology revolution and change has been characterised through the question of voice (how technology has enabled for alternative voices to emerge as ways by which they can be heard), question of amplification (what 10 years ago might have been local phenomena are becoming global spectacles) and the question of power (what really happens when voice and amplification comes to an end).

Nishant said that in the last three years of revolutions we have also now witnessed this extraordinary thing where lot of promises were made of different kinds of revolution but which never materialised in terms of what they intended to. Citizen action happens but it doesn’t lead into anything concrete. One of the examples from India was the Anna Hazare’s campaign or India’s fight against corruption. There was this immense amount of campaign on the corruption in Indian bureaucracy and political society... the only instance of mass mobilisation that we saw in India in recent times apart from the cricket series...and how the campaign in seven short months has totally disappeared from public discourse.

For more, watch the video now:

Date: March 9, 2012
Time: 12 to 1 p.m.
Venue: Library Conference Center Presentation Room, University of California

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D2E1

praskrishna — 2011-03-16T05:00:37Z

An opposition supporter holds up a laptop showing images of celebrations in Cairo's Tahrir Square, after Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak resigned (Photo: Reuters)

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Cyrus Mistry

praskrishna — 2012-11-30T04:41:50Z

Cyrus Mistry

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CyFy Agenda

praskrishna — 2015-10-16T03:01:13Z

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