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City in the Internet 1: Geography Imagined (Part 1)
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/city-in-the-internet
<b>“The estuaries that flirt with the land mass before they finally perish in the vast deep blue ocean beyond were perfect in their shape and grace. And you know what; from top it appears like a surreal landscape that is so restive and peaceful, almost heaven. The countryside is actually very beautiful”, says Pratyush Shankar in his latest blog post. A random conversation between two person discovering the joys of seeing our existence through Google Earth!</b>
<p>The use of maps through the Internet has seen a many fold increase in recent times. With availability of satellite information to anyone through various websites we are witnessing a sea change in the manner in which our space (cities, countryside and landscape) is being gazed upon. This is an important time historically, as it has the potential to fundamentally alter our imagination of space; right from the scale of a country to our neighbourhood block.</p>
<p>The Internet today is perhaps right in the middle of such mediation of the city and people. The Google maps, satellite imagery, road maps, place markers, are leading to a re-imagination of our own environment. Let us try and explore some of the key concepts that gets raised in the process of such expressions of space and its mental constructs. This is the part one of the essay and by the end of the next post I will try and speculate its impact on city spaces (yes the real space!)</p>
<h2>Story 1: Geography is sensed and lived in</h2>
<p>As a child growing up in a not so small town of Kota, Shailendra and his group of friends swore allegiance of silence and if needed deceit when it came to their weekend forays outside the city; a swim in the river Chambal. The swim was a big no-no for kids, as stories of people being washed away in the strong current of the merciless river that had steep banks, were drilled into every potentially aberrant child of the town. If not the force of the water it definitely had to be the crocodiles that wait for days together, at the dark bottom of the river for that one sweet sound of a child swimming above. After that it is only gore and blood. But Shailendra and his friends could not resist the temptation of a good swim in the cool water. He often boasted about his dives and his long swims and that he saw a crocodile come his way but swam faster than that wretched creature. And some time during a leisurely mood as he and his friends sat on the banks of the river, smoking Charminar with the Chambal swiftly passing below, he spoke about his dream of leaving this small city of aunts, cousins, family festivals, marriage, river and crocodile for the “big city”; the city of lights, new friends and endless possibilities. This is how he understood his city; small, protective and the big river on its periphery. The city was compact, the river dangerous, the slopes of the city lead to a valley which had rich but soft soil; not so perfect for foundations of buildings but great for mango orchards they frequented last summer. The orchards were owned by the Garasia’s, the land owning class of the villages around, and they made good money. They could marry off their daughters to neighboring villages and throw a lavish dinner for the community. Not bad at all, he thought considering the fact that this community had small land holding and almost no access to credit . Further downstream the villagers were much richer. The Patidar community here had access to capital from their ancestral assets and strong community networks as they used the river water for intense irrigation; they grew basmati rice, export quality very much “Made in India”. Their sons studied in boarding school at Mt. Abu and would often show0ff their recent shopping booty from Mumbai or Delhi. Enough land and plenty of water can do wonders he thought!</p>
<p>Shailendra and his friends understood the geography as much as they understood the economic processes that are associated with land and water all across the length and breath of the country. The agricultural modes as linked to the geography of land is as common a knowledge, as the fact that one has to remove slippers before entering the temple premise. The geographical understanding of a place or region is necessarily one of soil, surface drainage, river, canals and how it impacts building and agriculture activity. This is true for most souls of the large number of villages and towns of India. The geography taught at the local school’s is as abstract and distant as Galelio’s invention of telescope or closer home the 1857 mutiny against the British. Land is understood through immediate examples that affect and lets us understand the structure of space around; the relationship of land, its water bodies, forest, its produce, livestock, agriculture and people. It is this web of relationship that provides the primary reading of landscape. A reading emerging from survival and dreams. An understanding that is bodily and involves all sense.</p>
<h2>Story 2: Geography is contested</h2>
<p>The push and the subsequent fall was bad, considering the fact that it was only suppose to be a friendly game of football with the boys from the municipal school. Pyjama chhap; that’s what Ajay used to call these boys. Ajay knees were badly bruised, something he had got used to since he joined the school football team. But the injuries and the resultant bandage were in fact trophies he did not mind showing off in his neighborhood. Sweet pain eh! But today his encounter with the boys from Municipal School no -32, Kandivalle in the football match left him a bit shaken. There was something about that push, something strange in the eyes of the boys who did him in. No apology, no shake of hands but a brutal look as if that bunch might kill him if he come anywhere close to them. Ignoring the skirmishes, he soon carried out with his show of bandages in the knee and slight limp in school; a typical John Travalto one. This had been a regular ritual he performed often to woo the girls of the class, a show that said “I am the Alpha male and have just returned from a battle where I proved my supremacy. I am broken here and bruised there. Some sympathy, some support, some sweet nothing talk or maybe a gentle caress might help”. And life goes on. A daily ritual of updating the facebook profile, completing the homework, sourcing the “ultimate porn”, avoiding dad, recharging the sim, football practice and girls. </p>
<p>Life rolled on till the day Ajay was again confronted with the same pyjama chaap kids of the Municipal school. This time it was beyond the security of his school compound in the market street exposed to the elements. The same dirty look and menacing stare. He tried to smile but before he could realize the one in the center with a dark face and curly hair shouted “matherchod bahut shaana ho gaya hai tu” (mother fucker you have become too smart these days). Now this one was a pure googly. Ajay was stumped, confused and more than anything else he was sweating with fear. Why me and why here in full public view. But..but what is the matter boss, he said? Matter is very clear, said the other one with a squint eye; your dads behind eviction of two shops, one house, three families and four dogs. You assholes have brought these families to street because your dad brought the municipal bulldozers to clear the plot in front of his clinic so that he can plant trees and have a nice parking for his clients. Now this was heavy… very heavy. Ajay just could not fathom why it had to be him. And.. and what is in that piece of land anyways. A large neem tree, dusty rough surface, some shanty and a nullah flowing with the exposes water pipe.</p>
<p>The encounter lasted a few seconds but it was devastating. He ran to the comfort of his house and immediately asked for hot masala maggie. Oh sweet home; it felt so good to curl up on the couch, switch the channels of the television, check the emails; all so personalized and predictable. He wanted all the familiar comforts that day…</p>
<p>Ajay soon outgrew the incident and went about planning his daily inaction’s, weekly bunks and occasional dates. But that incident also changed him. He had a keener eye now, for both sensing trouble and also to things around him he earlier had failed to notice.</p>
<p>He understood how the rivulet that flows from the ghats to the sea, actually is the life line of some twenty thousand families that stay there with their dogs, cats, shops, scooters and some even cars. He knew that the mangroves of the city are now piece of trophy used by the environmentalist to rally for protection and stop the International Airport project. He knew how the Mumbai floods were actually man-made as subsequent corrupt municipal officers choose to ignore the fundamentals of topography and water. That is how he learned about the geography of his city; from being absolutely ignorant about his surroundings, he suddenly knew how his city is the space of conflict, of emancipation, deceit, opportunity and corruption. The fractured geography of his city told the story of survival, human ingenuity and violence.</p>
<h2> The “image from top”</h2>
<blockquote>“The view of the Earth from the Moon fascinated me—a small disk, 240,000 miles away. It was hard to think that that little thing held so many problems, so many frustrations. Raging nationalistic interests, famines, wars, pestilence don’t show from that distance”<br /></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Frank Borman, Astronaut aboard Apollo 8, ‘A Science Fiction World—Awesome Forlorn Beauty,’ Life magazine, January 1969.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The view of the earth from moon and satellites in the late 50′s and 60′s contributed to imagination of the planet as an artifact that is small, vulnerable and alone in space. It fed a whole generation of activists, scientist and media to speak about the earth as a unique place. The image of earth with its deep blue surface, clouds and spots became the single most important symbol that fueled the the hearts and minds of the generation, that questioned the development model of the western world. It attacked the core values of modernity and growth that was drunk on technology, performance and confidence to master the elements of nature. But at the same time, it hearled a very different way of reading space. Riding on the growth of both print and visual mediums it led to an explosion of imagery that showed the “God’s view of the earth”. A fantastic collage of calm blue oceans, neat forests and swirling clouds streams. The good old map that existed in Geography- II textbooks of schools were so boring now; way too abstract and almost a diagram.</p>
<p>That old maps did not inspire any spatial imagination but it did have these lines where none existed. The straight lines of longitude, the dark red meridian, the political boundary of nations, the dark circular one of the capital city. And yes the arrows; the ones showing the direction of the ocean current, swirling all around the blue waters. Maps are much maligned lot these days. Often seen as expressions of the intent to document, control and exploit the land that was colonized by them, maps were instrument of power struggle in India and elsewhere. But they do exist amongst us like many other colonial legacies. Maps are provocative, they express an opinion and engage with the user to form a dialogue of questions and answers. For example the map of Delhi metro is statement of origin-destination possibilities of the large city. A statement of the state of flows and possibilities for movement of one self in the space.</p>
<p>Maps are a statement of processes of space which may or may not express visually. For example the map showing the per-capita consumption of cereals in a district, may or may not manifest as a form. It is the story of the people, their ability to access food supplies etc.</p>
<p>The map is telling a story that made you develop an imagination of space. The satellite image leaves nothing for imagination.</p>
<p>But the view from top has often been perceived to be the real space; as it actually exists. Unlike maps that are either surveyed and drawn, Google Maps and such derivatives on the internet today use an “image from top” as a basic conceptual ground to explore space. Let us now try to deconstruct this phenomenon further.</p>
<p>The image of space below taken from top is important from the point of view of creating grounds for further information. The image pretends to be complete, authentic, accurate and real. There is no possibility for error. The camera are special, there lens accurate, the satellite is state of art and the image is not “photo-shopped”. This portrayal assumes that the visual image is the baseline reality to be recognized. The image then claims to be “the” window to reality and becomes the mediator between the person and his/ her imagination of the surrounding space. Unlike maps wherein the first cut documentation is a bodily involvement of people with space while conducting physical surveys, it is the snap of the camera in case of satellite images. Whereas it is common knowledge that ground physical survey are way too accurate in terms of their dimensional characteristics, the “image from top” are seen to be more closer to reality. This raises interesting questions from the point of view of our understanding of space be it the forests, oceans, rivers, countryside or cities.</p>
<p>Will the dependence on the image (satellite pictures) and its derivative maps that we are witnessing through the internet today for visualizing space lead to a viewer that is satisfied with the “happy” image of his surroundings? Does it mean that the visual (image) becomes more important than the “process” (be it processes of nature, human survival, achievement etc) when imagining space. In short are the meanings attached to the image limited now than before.</p>
<p>So are we headed towards a more homogeneous imagination of our space and its parts due to the mediation by the same image through the internet? The forest are dense, the plantations greens, the coastline smooth, the old city organic and water bodies are deep blue.</p>
<p><strong>Wait! The story has a new twist</strong></p>
<p>But there is something also happening to the image on the internet. There are place markers, text, suggestions, stories, links to other site and even pictures overlaid on the satellite images or its maps. The story is getting interesting now; the technological possibility of user participation is creating a new layer of information and opinions on the maps. Far from being a specialized cartographic exercise, maps are being now created by people. It expresses their impressions, choices and preferences about their space.</p>
<p><strong>This phenomenon of the individual expressions over the expanse of the vast space is new and needs to be further understood. More about it in the next post…..</strong></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/city-in-the-internet'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/city-in-the-internet</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnainternet and societycybercultures2012-03-13T10:43:50ZBlog EntryInternet, Society and Space in Indian City: First Report
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/internet-society-space
<b>This is the first report on the progress of the research on Internet, Society and Space in Indian City. The post is a collection of some of the initial focus of these studies. I have started simultaneously exploring and testing various arguments and have listed some key observations from the ones that are nearing completion. </b>
<p><img class="image-inline" src="../../city-poster-10/image_preview" alt="City Poster 10" /></p>
<p>The idea of the relationship of Internet with space throws interesting challenges from the perspective of both the theoretical premises and actual research methods followed to tease out the issue. I have been exploring the following line of inquiry in the first month and a half of the research:</p>
<ol><li>To understand the broad patterns of representation of cities in Indian from both a historical (classical) traditions and contemporary popular practices</li><li>To derive the key hypothesis for the narrative research of the different persons leading to rendering of characteristics of the target group to be interviewed</li><li>To develop the method for researching issues of spacial transformations as related to mobility and change in land-use patterns<br /></li></ol>
<h3>Notes from Field Studies</h3>
<p>Representation of space in various mediums was of special interest to me, as it reveals a lot about our cities, both in terms of what physically exists and is imagined. The aim was to capture the ideas of such representations both in popular as well as formal/ classical mediums. The search started with the old part of Ahmedabad, which is the centre of trade and commerce for not only the city but also the region at large. A wholesale seller of books on medicine, the Navneet school textbook, the Anchor electrical switches, the Tullu pump motor and the Taparia screwdriver are all here in the old city. This part of the city is the heart, which supports life way beyond its own space.</p>
<p>The book wholesalers were of special interest to me as I was looking for the front page of the notebooks that kids use in schools. Unlike the time when I studied, the long notebooks these days are full of illustrations in the front and back cover. The bullet trains of Japan superimposed on the Eiffel tower of Paris, the natural environment and the deer chewing grass in strange oblivion, the view of the skyscraper of Singapore or a globe with a tree on top are all seemingly inconsequential images on textbooks these days. I was particularly interested in the ones that make a statement on the city and its parts or rather literally had a whiff of 'space'.</p>
<p align="center"> <img class="image-inline" src="../../city-poster-7/image_preview" alt="City Poster 7" /></p>
<p> The wall posters that are sold on the streets were also analyzed for the content and focus. The cheaply printed bright coloured posters are a wonderful reflection of our society and by virtue of their content, have a pan-Indian appeal. Salman Khan soaked in blood, Katrina Kaif with pouted lips, the solitary rural lady sitting below a pine tree with her head down and singing “When will you come back my love”, a idyllic rural street with bullock carts or the view of fort area of Mumbai are some such illustrations on these posters.</p>
<p>This particular study of popular modes of representation raises interesting questions from the point of view of perception of space both in terms of the actual lived in experience and the meanings attached to the same.</p>
<p align="center"><img class="image-inline" src="../../city-poster-1/image_preview" alt="City Poster 1" /></p>
<h3>The Nature and the Cities</h3>
<p>The yearning for nature or rather an apparent moral quest for some kind of a harmony seems to be a prevailing attitude in lot of the popular representation that I studied. The intensity of development is often proportionate to the 'prestineness' of the nature that surrounds it. Development is seen as a clean activity in the lap of nature! But on further examination one observes a consistent effort to juxtapose nature and city life in a binary relationship. Even though mixed up together to suggest a kind of romantic co-existence, the treatment makes it obviously as two different realms.</p>
<p align="center"> <img class="image-inline" src="../../city-poster-6/image_preview" alt="City Poster 6" /></p>
<p>The imagination of cities and nature as two different realms is an important concept and will be explored further.</p>
<p align="center"><img class="image-inline" src="../../city-poster-11/image_preview" alt="City Poster 11" /></p>
<p>I will return to it while describing similar city representation patterns in the historical classical traditions such as Miniature paintings.</p>
<h3>The Made-Up Context</h3>
<p>The range of representation needs further examination from the point of view of the perception of cities and its spaces. Large numbers of posters were actually an interesting collage that somehow brought together picturesque images of iconic building from around the world in a kind of new juxtapositions. </p>
<p align="center"><img class="image-inline" src="../../city-poster-9/image_preview" alt="City Poster 9" /></p>
<p>Authenticity does not matter, nor does context as long as it is reflective of the ‘developed’ countries. Iconic buildings like the Eiffel Tower, Sydney Opera House or Mumbai VT terminal capture the imagination of the people as symbols of human habitation. But what is more important is the fact that these symbols almost purposefully are far removed from the context in which they are produced and consumed. This is interesting as by the virtue of its cultural, spatial and contextual differences, the representations have a dream or unreal aspects to its existence. This feeling of disconnect and the unreal is important in this form of representation as it floats as an imagination that should never ever come anywhere close to reality; A space which is so fictitious that it hardy needs to connect at all with the physical world. Similarly, many posters tried to portray the romance of the rural life of India.</p>
<p align="center"><img class="image-inline" src="../../city-poster-8/image_preview" alt="City Poster 8" /></p>
<p align="center"><img class="image-inline" src="../../city-poster-4/image_preview" alt="City Poster 4" /></p>
<p>The lady waiting for her lover, the village hut and the bullock cart drawn not as a reality but as symbols, juxtaposed to remind its viewers the virtues of the rural living. The caricatured symbols of rural life that are shown in these illustrations elevate the production into a fictional and surreal space that is far removed from cities where it is consumed and also very different from the vast hinterland of the country that they pretend to represent. This hyper and almost mythical representation of space is a very important condition to all these illustrations leading to interesting questions of how our city spaces are imagined. It seems that this fiction or rather the surrealist attitude is very important aspect in popular imagination of space in the Indian context.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/internet-society-space'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/internet-society-space</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnainternet and societycybercultures2011-08-02T06:06:25ZBlog EntryCPOV: Critical Point of View
http://editors.cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/Wikiwars
<b>The Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India) and the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam, Netherlands) seek to bring together ideas, experiences and scholarship about Wikipedia in a reader that charts out detailed user stories as well as empirical and analytical work to produce.. The organisations will jointly host two separate conferences aimed at building a Wikipedia Knowledge Network and charting scholarship and stories about The Wikipedia from around the world. </b>
<h2 align="center"><strong>CPOV: Critical Point of View</strong></h2>
<h2 align="center"><strong>Wikipedia
and the Politics of Open Knowledge</strong></h2>
<div align="left" class="pullquote">Proposal for a research network, two conferences
and a reader</div>
<div align="left" class="pullquote"> </div>
<div class="pullquote"> Organized by Centre for Internet & Society
(Bangalore, India) and the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam,
Netherlands)</div>
<p><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>Introduction:</strong> It would be no exaggeration to state that
Wikipedia is at the brink of becoming the de facto global reference of dynamic
knowledge. The highly visible clashes amongst opinion leaders, university
professors, Web 2.0 ‘evangelists’ and publishers over accuracy, anonymity,
trust, vandalism and expertise only seem to fuel further growth of Wikipedia
and its user base. In this respect, what does it mean to now say that Wikipedia
has become “mainstream”?</p>
<p>The accelerated growth and scope of Wikipedia as
a knowledge reference of universal ambition is unheard of. The Google search
engine gives preferential treatment to Wikipedia in an attempt to beat search
engine optimizers and to provide a more fruitful experience to its users. Apart
from leaving its modern counterparts <em>Britannica</em> and <em>Encarta</em> in
the dust, such scale and breadth places Wikipedia on par with such historical
milestones as Pliny the Elder's <em>Naturalis Historia</em>, the Ming Dynasty's <em>Wen-hsien
ta-ch' eng</em>, and the key work of French Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie.</p>
<p>Wikipedia owns a whole set of characteristics –
including number and automation (bots) of contributors, regularity of updates,
fluidity, ease of search, number of languages, and growing user base. In doing
so, this online encyclopedia might be cited as the most visible and successful
example of the migration of FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) principles
into mainstream culture. Those of us who believe in pluralism, and the
possibility of another world have reason to celebrate and defend Wikipedia from
intellectual- property-right-maximalists
and promoters of proprietary models of knowledge production and dissemination.
However, such celebration and defense should contain critical insights,
informed by the changing realities of the Internet at large and the Wikipedia
project in particular.</p>
<p>The Wikimedia Foundation has recently employed
its first research analyst and provides spaces for “Wikipediology”, including
projects such as the Wiki Project on vandalism studies. Nonetheless, critical
Wikipedia research should also be done outside the self-reflexivity of the
Wikimedia Foundation and its community. There is an urgent need for
quantitative and qualitative research from an Humanities and Arts perspective
that could benefit both the wider user base and the active Wikipedia community
itself.</p>
<p>More than this though, as one of the largest if
not the largest self-contained general knowledge reference of our time,
Wikipedia offers critical insights into the contemporary status of knowledge,
its organizing principles, function, and impact; its production styles,
mechanisms for conflict resolution and power (re-)constitution. New strategic
and tactical operations of knowledge/power are clearly at work. The concept of
the open remains ambiguous in this formation, serving as both a rallying
concept and masking new agonistic encounters.</p>
<p>By permanently (re)formulating the open and
inclusive as the guiding Wikipedia principle being formulated by the community
itself, one might also look at this norm as a narrative or even call it a
founding myth. For example, the demographic profile of the Wikipedia editor as
a white male geek with a limited mono-cultural worldview based on Western
rationality remains a concern. However, the question of (non)diversity being
formulated in Wikipedia discussions needs also to be posed beyond existing
stereotypes and at the general level of discourse. The question of
(post)identity and representation is not necessarily resolved via the
discursive construction of 'inclusion', if such inclusion may require leaving
competing knowledge histories and practices at the door and if it puts a
culture of editing not next to a culture of listening/hearing.</p>
<p>In the most material and perceptional way, every
new technology modifies conditions of possibility for knowledge. The logic of
technologies bleeds into the very structures and organizing principles of
knowledge and today, both medium and message may reflect the<em> </em>ideas of the (organized) network<em>,</em> multitude or the Deleuzian
machine<em>.</em> It is through a selected mix of technological and
normative conditions – the distributed architecture of the net, the Wiki
software platform, commons-based property licenses and the FLOSS zeitgeist –
that Wikipedia as the encyclopedia of the information age emerges, both
continuing and transforming the Enlightenment encyclopedic impulse or <em>will
to know</em>.</p>
<p>The authors of these proposal are aware of the
seemingly conflicting overarching research agenda: At one level is a
philosophical, epistemological and theoretical investigation of knowledge
artifacts and social, culture construction in terms of , authority and
politics. At the other level the research agenda is an empirical, anecdotal,
sociological investigation of the specific phenomenon of the Wikipedia. This
has been done on purpose so that the learnings from theoretical research
activities can inform practice oriented research and vice-versa.</p>
<p>Overall the conferences and reader may include
the following areas inviting theoretical, empirical, practical and art-based
contributions:</p>
<ol type="1" start="1"><li><em>WikiTheory
(opening session)</em></li><li><em>Wikipedia and
Critique of Western Knowledge Production</em></li><li><em>Encyclopedia
Models-- from 18th to 21th Century</em></li><li><em>Wiki Art</em></li><li><em>Designing Debate</em></li><li><em>Critique of Free and Open</em></li><li><em>Global
Politics of Exclusion</em></li><li><em>The
Place of Resistance</em></li><li><em>Wikipedia and Education</em></li><li><em>Wiki-analytics, Wikipedia as Platform and Software Studies</em></li><li><em>Wikipedia and Conditions of Knowledge Production<br /></em></li></ol>
<p> </p>
<h3>Descriptions of the Sessions/Fields of Interest</h3>
<p class="callout"> <em>1. WikiTheory –
Mining for Concepts (opening session)</em></p>
<p>Besides providing a general overview of the
topics to come, and with an emphasis on diverse global approaches, the aim here
is develop concepts that could be used in further research and that could fit
into larger projects on Internet culture and the critique of the free and open.
Is it possible to develop a counter-hegemony of critical practices that
situates itself in the midst of technological cultures? What kind of critical
lessons does Wikipedia provide in the face of overwhelming Web 2.0 hype and P2P
utopianism? How can a radical Wikipedia critique be developed that does not
present itself as the cynical ‘I told you so’ outsider or mimic the
neo-conservatist position of Andrew Keen? What kind of insight can Wikipedia
offer regarding the continuing tension between knowledge and information?</p>
<p class="callout"><em>2.
Wikipedia and Critical Histories of Western Knowledge Production</em></p>
<div class="pullquote">This session may include topics like: western vs.
non/post-western knowledge production, textual vs. oral tradition, visual vs.
textual knowledge, Wikipedia and language diversity, and indigenous knowledge.</div>
<p>The persistence of almost buried
master-narratives: The Western tradition of Enlightenment tends to permeate
both common and official understandings of knowledge on Wikipedia. Mirroring
the Enlightenment itself, Wikipedia both offers a very particular type of
knowledge and simultaneously makes claims upon the universal - e.g. in the
formulation of visionary goals, structure of articles, author positions,
writing style, categorization of entries, conflict resolution models and so on.
The ways in which such ideals persist and continue to bear their mark on the
present in often subtle ways requires further attention. Indeed, the 'grand
narratives' of the Enlightenment that Jean-Francis Lyotard claimed had
retreated with the emergence of 'computerized societies' continue to inform the
popular imaginary in ways largely untouched by the deconstructive moment.
Frederic Jameson once referred to this as the 'persistence of buried
master-narratives', a 'political unconscious' that guides decisions
irrespective of philosophical status. Likewise, this resonates with Foucault's
urge 'to reveal a <em>positive unconscious</em> of knowledge' as that which
performs the task of subjugation but operates beyond contention. What matters
here is not truth or belief, but operation.</p>
<p>The predominance of textual or even linguistical
cultures: The current system of Wikipedia citation prejudices textual systems
of knowledge over oral and visual systems of knowledge. This under-values the
knowledge systems of cultural memory and related technique such as mnemo
techniques or oral poetry on the one hand, and illiterate populations on the
other hand.</p>
<p> </p>
<p class="callout"><em>3.
Encyclopedia Models-- from 18th to 21th Century</em></p>
<p>The word made durable: In this session we want to
give an overview of various attempts to create a collection of global
knowledge. In order to get a better understanding of the cultural specificity
of the underlying code on which Wikipedia is built, this topic seeks to dig
further into the histories of the encyclopedia. D' Alembert's <em>Preliminary
Discourse</em> to the <em>Encyclopedie</em> is often described as the most
succinct statement of European Enlightenment, and the Encyclopedie itself as
the material project of Enlightenment. It is through the <em>Encyclopedie</em>
that the Enlightenment becomes durable, tangible and disseminated. What can be
learned by examining such historical precedents?</p>
<p>Encyclopedias have been said to be sources of
national images and stereotypes of the self and the other within Europe. In
Wikipedia image construction tends to be both disembogue and masked in favor of
a cosmopolitan, global self-understanding. This session might interrogate to
what extent knowledge production’s construction of national images is shifted
from a discursive to an automatic georeferencing system of construction.</p>
<p>As machines think (or maybe Knowing Machines or
The Machinic Intellect): This session may also look to historical attempts to
revolutionize knowledge through the creation of new technologies and to what
extent these alternate histories resonate with Wikipedia specifically and the
technologies of the Net as driven by knowledge imperatives more generally. Examples
include the Mundaneum, the Memex, the Galactic Network and project Xanadu. </p>
<p class="callout"><em>4.
Wikipedia Art</em></p>
<p>Art at the gates: Wikipedia Art is understood
both as artwork and intervention. Taking place largely on Wikipedia itself, the
project Wikipedia Art was considered controversial and was quickly removed (see
recent debate on nettime-l). What does this project reveal about this type of
knowledge production? What is the threshold of legitimacy for this type of
knowledge and how are the boundaries policed? What is at stake in the rejection
of art?</p>
<p class="callout"><em>5.
Models of Disambiguation and Designing Debate </em></p>
<div class="pullquote"><em>May
include topics like: </em>Dissent made visible, After Talk / Alerts /
Mailing Lists, the role of forum software, technical opportunities for
discontent, barnstars/award culture.</div>
<p>The paradox of neutrality: The Neutral Point of
View policy of Wikipedia does not always accurately depict the state of debate
on topics: The view held by a corporate lobby, using funded research, will find
equal space as the opinions of thousands of disadvantaged persons who might be
impacted by the actions of the corporate lobby. Would it make sense to replace
the NPoV policy and think about Wikipedia as a space of open political
agonality; as a battle for meaning underpinned by the desire for reason?</p>
<p>New crises of authenticity: As Wikipedia gains
the status of default reference for other printed textual knowledge artifacts –
there are emerging challenges of representation; longevity born digital
references; digital manipulation of sources; and circular referencing.
Shuddhabrata Sengupta of CSDS/Sarai says “Wikipedia encouraged in its community
the active exercise of a critical and skeptical attitude towards any received
form of knowledge”. In this context the evolving notions of authenticity has to
be further interrogated given the rise of peer-produced knowledge and the
diminishing cult of the expert. <em></em></p>
<p> </p>
<p class="callout"><em>6.
Critique of Free and Open </em></p>
<div class="pullquote">May include topics like: the parasite model of
free culture (“You work for free, others will make the money from your free
labour.”), governance, the role of developers, economy of Wikipedia, the beliefs
of the founders as the political foundation of Wikipedia, critical
interrogation of knowledge in relation to 'the open'.</div>
<p>Vacuous collaboration: Master concepts like
freedom and openness are at constant risk of remaining empty or constituting an
‘empty signifier’. The failure to fill such concepts has lead to many
descriptions of Wikipedia as 'collaborations' or even 'ad hoc meritocracies'
(Alex Bruns). Both these second-tier notions also tend to mask the
reconfiguration of the political and new forms of closure.</p>
<p>Paid and voluntary community manipulation: Many
Wikipedians hold strong opinions on range of sensitive areas including identity,
religion, science, politics, culture, and use sophisticated techniques such as
astro-turfing on Wikipedia. Additionally, some states, corporations and
organized religious groups sometimes pay specialists to engage in astro-turfing
in order to remove critical opinions and rewrite information from Wikipedia.</p>
<p> </p>
<p class="callout"><em>7.
Global Politics of Exclusion </em></p>
<div class="pullquote"><em>May
include topics like: </em>non-western, language, connectedness, oral
histories, women, non-geeks.</div>
<p>Tyranny of the connected: In societies which are
compounded by digital and participation divides, the connected usually always
win over those who don't have access and time to spare.</p>
<p>Gendered Knowledge: While women are strongly
represented among readers, globally, they are
hardly represented among contributors. In offlist chats, women express
that they do not feel comfortable when contributing to Wikipedia conversations.
They even felt silenced by the perception of Wikipedia as a masculine tech
culture. Some women have already created an alternative space of discussion at
wikichix.org. Does the separation of discussion spaces and the marginalization
of domestic issues and social impacts on Wikipedia turn back time?</p>
<p>Morality laundering: Moral standards that exist
in one country are being exported to other countries via Wikipedia. For
example, photo-realistic images of human bodies on pages dealing with sexuality
and anatomy are being replaced with drawings. Does this type of common
denominator approach undermine the pluralism of global sexuality? The call and
eventual refusal of image censorship for the entry on Mohammad represents a
similar scenario.</p>
<p>Language diversity: Despite the self-imposed
normative claim of language diversity and the self-description of Wikipedia as
a truly multi-lingual project, English is the Lingua Franca in translingual
meta projects and policy discussions. Also, on the level of content, is the
English Wikipedia the 'Leitmedium' in terms of (content) synchronization. In
what other ways does the language divide operate on Wikipedia?</p>
<p>Global governance: Governance of Wikipedia has
evolved and become increasingly sophisticated to match its phenomenal growth
and the attention it has garnered. While these changes in governance have
managed to sustain the growth of Wikipedia and prevent its credibility from
being undermined, there is a need to understand the impact that various
governance mechanisms have on the different incarnations of Wikipedia
throughout the world. Such analysis should consider separately (and compare)
different national chapters, plus extend beyond Wikipedia projects to the
governance of the Wikimedia Foundation.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Form and format: As the Wikipedia becomes a
standard of documentation and knowledge archive, it becomes important to focus
on traditional, oral and ephemeral knowledges which might die because of the
limitations of technologised platforms to capture them. Oral histories,
community knowledges, incipient systems of documenting personal and collective
memories, etc. start getting lost as the logo-centric, ‘objectively verifiable’
structures of knowledge production come into being. Rather than a critique of
Wikipedia, analysis needs to concentrate on ways by which such knowledge
systems are not lost and further tools which need to be developed in order to
make them accessible and visible.</p>
<p> </p>
<p class="callout"><em>8.
The Place of Resistance</em></p>
<p>Why do people resign from Wikipedia? Are critical
voices silenced by the majority of the mass? Does the exclusion of the
Wikipedia Art project reveal that within Wikipedia is no place for contesting
forms, repertoires, styles that go beyond linguistic approaches? Rituals and
mechanisms of exclusion offers critical insights into the contemporary status
of resistance formation in an paradigmatic age of diversity and inclusion.
Going beyond and extending the thinking of social movement scholars such as
Touraine or Melucci the study of Wikipedia might inform culture and identity
approaches of social movement studies and vice versa.</p>
<p>Can Wikipedia said to be a social movement and/or
how do social movement actors appropriate the Wikipedia to built alternatives?</p>
<p class="callout"><em>9.
Media Literacy and Education </em></p>
<p>Knowing about knowing: While technologies like
newspapers, television, radio and cinema have given birth to educational
institutions that engage in media studies, thereby providing tools for the
discerning citizen-consumer and future professional, there is still much work
required to develop similar critical models for emerging projects like
Wikipedia. The common institutional (non)response to warn against the ‘dangers’
of Wikipedia-like projects and discourage or ban their use seems grossly
inadequate. The rise of 'prosumers' suggests a need for new 'production
literacies' in addition to the traditional 'consumption literacy'. Furthermore,
there is also a growing number of meta projects on Wikipedia that seek cooperation
with schools and academia. But is the Wikimedia foundation and select national
bodies the legitimate actors to teach media literacy or is this rather a public
relations effort? What would Wikipedia literacy entail?</p>
<p class="callout"><em>10.
Wiki-analytics, Wikipedia as Platform and Software Studies</em></p>
<div class="pullquote"><em>Possible Topics: </em>Protocological
Knowledge, Knowledge vs. Information, Cultural Analytics, Cybernetics in the
present, (Un)dead labour and the posthuman bot.</div>
<p>Knowledge in the neighborhood of software: Can we
start thinking of Wikipedia as an interplay of editors and technology, since
software and notification systems are such an important part of the Wikipedia
project? Indeed, whilst humans argue over knowledge statements, 'bots' do much
of the dirty work and general knowledge housekeeping – a kind of (un)dead
labour. The presumption here, of code as politics, is that the wiki principles
themselves need to be debated from a perspective of software studies. To what
extent has bot politics triumphed over vernacular expertise or lead to an empowerment of the e-tech geeks
in knowledge projects? Related to this is the question of the cultural history
of Wikipedia as a platform. What is the relation between policy formation and
technical protocols? Is Wikipedia knowledge
Cybernetic?</p>
<p>Wikipedia as a data set: Besides the automation
participation in the form of the bot, Wikipedia is an information artifact
through and through. What kind of data analysis techniques can contribute to a
radical critique or illuminate network regularities beyond human
interpretation? What additional anonymised data sets of edit and use history
should be released by the Wikimedia Foundation to promote media literacy and
education.</p>
<p> </p>
<p class="callout"><em>11.
Wikipedia and Conditions of Knowledge Production</em></p>
<div class="pullquote">Possible Topics: Politics of knowledge production,
question of authority, The fallacy of objectivity, Wikipedia and the Public
Sphere.</div>
<p>The alarm that traditional bastions of
knowledge production and consumption (like universities and publishing houses)
raise against Wikipedia, brings into sharp relief, the fact that the Wikipedia
is a part of a much larger knowledge production industry. With the Wikipedia’s
integration into more ‘mainstream’ usage, it becomes necessary to focus on how
the emergence of such a space (and the principles it embodies) also affects the
much larger and global politics, aesthetics and mechanics of knowledge
production. Wikipedia has substantially changed academic trends of publication,
citation, classroom pedagogy and research. It has also been central to many
debates about who produces knowledge and who has the ‘right’ to be an Authority
on the knowledge thus produced.</p>
<p>Moving beyond the class-room and questions
of plagiarism or teaching, there is need to investigate the pre-conditions and
the contexts within which Wikipedia emerges, and the kind of questions it poses
to processes of knowledge production, consumption and verification.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3><em>Production
Details</em></h3>
<p>Besides setting up a network for critical
Wikipedia research with its own mailing list and organizing two events early
2010 in Bangalore and Amsterdam (to start with), the aim is to gather materials
for a Wikipedia Research Reader that will be published in the INC Reader series
around September-October 2010.</p>
<div class="pullquote">Research and editorial group: Geert Lovink and
Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam), Nathaniel Tkacz (Melbourne), Sunil Abraham
(Bangalore), Johanna Niesyto (Siegen), Nishant Shah (Bangalore).</div>
<h3><em>Contact
info: </em></h3>
<p>Sunil Abraham: <a href="mailto:sunil@cis-india.org">sunil@cis-india.org</a></p>
<p>Nishant Shah: <a href="mailto:Nishant@cis-india.org">Nishant@cis-india.org</a></p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>For more information on how to apply to the Bangalore WikiWars conference, please <a title="CPOV - Critical Point of View : Wikiwars" class="internal-link" href="/research/conferences/wikiwars">click here</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/Wikiwars'>http://editors.cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/Wikiwars</a>
</p>
No publishernishantWikipediaart and interventioncyberculturesdigital subjectivesVandalismdigital artdigital pluralism2009-07-13T09:07:42ZBlog EntryEmerging Bit Torrent Trends in India
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/emerging-bit-torrrent-trends-in-india
<b>Internet has been a revelation ever since its introduction. The writer in this blog examines how the progress made by Internet based technologies could never be reversed.</b>
<h2>From Kazaa to The Pirate Bay</h2>
<p>Little did the world of the VHS era realize in its time where the future of pirate technologies were heading to. The world's favourite music and films were quickly transferred onto optical discs as magnetic tapes went obsolete a few years before the end of the last century. Internet was soon to become the nemesis of discs, which were bulky to store and scratched easily. The first tryst with peer to peer technologies on networks sent shivers down the spine of Jack Valenti and the Motion Pictures Association of America. The speed of dissemination and distribution of content over the Internet was something the world had never seen before. The lawsuits against peer to peer networks such as Kaaza and Limewire ran into millions of dollars. Websites were shut down, but time and progress of technology could never be reversed. BitTorrent soon became the most common protocol to transfer content over the Internet. BitTorrent metafiles themselves do not store copyrighted data. Hence, BitTorrent itself is not illegal. However, its use to make copies of copyrighted material that contravenes laws in many countries has created many controversies, including the now famous Pirate Bay Trial in Sweden. The popularity of torrents though
is not specific to the Western world. The strength of the Internet lies in its ability to generate content from any corner of the world
which is then spread across the world through a web of distribution reaching many computers and granting them access to the content simultaneously.<strong><br /></strong></p>
<h2><strong>Desi content on Torrent Networks</strong></h2>
<p><strong>Desi : A term derived from Sanskrit, meaning region, province or country. It now refers to the people and culture of South Asian Diaspora.</strong></p>
<p><strong>On the most popular BitTorrent search engines, <a href="http://torrentz.com/" target="_blank">torrentz.com</a>, Hindi and Hindi movies are permanent search tags. Often, one would even see the names of popular Bollywood releases such as Dev D, or at the time of writing this blog entry, Telegu Films, prominently displayed on the site. Bollywood and other content created in India and the rest of the subcontinent is driving the cyberspace. With a huge diaspora spread across every part of the world and increasing Internet penetration alongside rising broadband speeds in urban India, the demand for desi content on torrent networks is on the rise. Websites such as <a href="http://desitorrents.com/" target="_blank">desitorrents.com</a> and <a href="http://dctorrent.com/" target="_blank">dctorrent.com</a> are two torrent search engines that are popular amongst Internet users and cater exclusively to desi content. A closer look at the content on these sites reveal that the most popular content on these torrent networks are television shows, cricket matches, Bollywood movies, music and regional cinema. Torrent scenes such as aXXo are not unique to Hollywood uploads alone. Desi content has its own torrent scenes, responsible for uploading torrent trackers, as soon as the content is out in the public. Users identifying themselves as Jay, Captain Jack or Gunga Din are busy uploading these files on the desi networks.
</strong></p>
<p><strong>Online since January 2004 and an Internet traffic rank of 7,302, an average visitor spends 8.3 minutes on the Desi Torrents site everyday. Relative to the general Internet population, the website has the highest number of male visitors in the age group of 18 to 34.<br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>Most users are college graduates who prefer to access the website from home. In comparison, Desi Club Torrents, which is a free website has
a younger representative web demographic with males between 18 to 24 years of age being the most prominent visitors. According to the
data, it is also revealed that the website has a higher ratio of visitors who have not attended Graduate School but still have attended some college for education</strong></p>
<h2><strong>Impact on the Traditional Markets</strong></h2>
<strong>
</strong>
<p><strong>In most cases, the popularity of Bollywood films in cinema halls and
on torrent sites seems to be linked. For example, the most successful
Bollywood film of 2008, Ghajini, which ended up raking Rs. 200 crores
on the box office, is also one of the most downloaded films on Bit
Torrent Networks. However, for the Pirate selling DVD's of latest
films, this is not great news. A majority of their customers have migrated to
downloading films on the Internet using Peer to Peer technologies.
The upper middle-class niche film watching audiences, have been the
fastest to acquire computers and get on the Internet. Increasing
broadband speeds have ensured that this segment of consumer
transitions away from the traditional 'on the corner' pirate shop. </strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/emerging-bit-torrrent-trends-in-india'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/emerging-bit-torrrent-trends-in-india</a>
</p>
No publishersiddharthCyberspaceinternet and societyPiracyIntellectual Property Rightscyberculturescyberspaces2011-08-04T04:44:48ZBlog EntryPleasure and Pornography: Pornography and the Blindfolded Gaze of the Law
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/the-blindfolded-gaze-of-the-law-and-pornography
<b>In the legal discourse, pornography as a category is absent, except as an aggravated form of obscenity. Does this missing descriptive category assist in the rampant circulation of pornography, either online or offline? Rather than ask that question, Namita Malhotra, in this second post documenting her CIS-RAW project, explores certain judgments that indeed deal with pornographic texts and uncovers the squeamishness that ensures that pornography as an object keeps disappearing before the law.
</b>
<p><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>When Justicia, blindfolded, cannot see the profane …</strong><br /><br />In the legal discourse, pornography as a category is absent, except as an aggravated form of obscenity (1). Does this missing descriptive category assist in the rampant circulation of pornography, either online or offline? Rather than ask that question, I would like to explore certain judgments that indeed deal with pornographic texts and uncover the squeamishness that ensures that pornography as an object keeps disappearing before the law.</p>
<p>For instance, in the case of Fatima Riswana V. Chennai & Ors. (2) both the public prosecutor and counsel for the petitioners applied to the court for transfer to another (male) judge, to save the District Lady Judge from embarrassment. The order for transfer was passed, so that the District Lady Judge does not have to view certain CDs that are part of the evidence. The justification for this is that the 'said trial would be about the exploitation of women and their use in sexual escapades by the accused, and the evidence in the case is in the form of CDs, viewing of which would be necessary in the course of the trial; therefore, for a woman Presiding Officer it would cause embarrassment'.</p>
<p>This is a rather obvious case, where explicit and pornographic material is made to disappear before the eyes of the law, gesturing towards the larger complicity that allows society and law to create a ruckus about Richard Gere and Shilpa Shetty’s kiss, HBO's English movie channel, dance bars and other such aspects of the sleazy modernity that we inhabit (3), but simultaneously is oblivious to circulation of pornography, both online and offline.</p>
<p>In a rather confrontational visual juxtaposition, I place Savita Bhabhi alongside Husain’s Mother India, to be able to ask several questions, including the question of which one’s existence has been more threatened by the law. There is almost no doubt about it; Savita Bhabhi’s chequered career as a slutty housewife has been marred only by two scandals (and several almost patriotic accounts of India having finally arrived (4)) – once when a child sent an MMS about his teacher and it made references to Savita Bhabi, which led to some mention of action that might be taken against the website (5), and another time when Karan Johar (Mid Day, Delhi – 31 March 2009) remarked that one of the characters, Jeet, has a look similar to that given to Amitabh Bachchan in 'Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna', and this might be a case of copyright infringement. Neither of these have resulted in any serious charge against the alleged anonymous producers, Indian Porn Empire, or what is more probable, the blocking of the website regardless of whether the producers/creators can be found and prosecuted. However Husain’s untitled painting, which surfaced on a website for an auction for victims of a Kashmir earthquake in 2006 (two years after it was first sold by the painter), was dragged to court on serious charges of obscenity, which fortunately led to a rather progressive judgment on obscenity by the Delhi High Court.</p>
<p>Returning to the two images of nude women, obscenity law in India has laid down that “nudity in art and literature is not per se evidence of obscenity”. As stated in the judgment that dealt with the circulation of Hussain’s untitled painting (later titled 'Bharat Mata') 'the work as a whole must be considered, the obscene matter must be considered by itself and separately to find out whether it is so gross and its obscenity so decided that it is likely to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to influences of this sort'. What renders an object obscene is the transaction rather than the text -- a transaction involving the depiction-consumption of the female body , and the sexualisation of the viewer who in turn sexualises the object. It is not just that the painting/image may already be sexualized but also that the public is in turn sexualised by looking at it (and sexualises it with its
gaze), thus making them vulnerable to the perversion that is modernity
itself and the pornographic gaze (Nitya Vasudevan and Namita A. Malhotra, State of Desire - Unpublished article). To put it simply, the anxiety of the state is not just about the object, but also about its circulation in the public, and the meanings it acquires through these series of transactions.</p>
<p>Legal and public discourse is often obsessed with the various meanings that become possible because of the placing of this naked body - or the transactions of this naked body with the context, background, narrative that it is placed in. Though seemingly sexualised already as a naked body (this can be refuted not only by the Indian court but various examples in art, religious architecture, etc.) the meanings it may carry are further complicated when it is placed in a pornographic comic online, bearing a crown and saying 'I will be Miss India', or as a faceless hazy outline in the foreground of the map of India. Hussain’s depiction of the naked woman on the map of India, embodying India (in pain or anger) carries many jostling, conflicting meanings. Inspite of the furore over the painting, the High Court finally held that the painting was not obscene, stating that the intention of the painter was to evoke sympathy for a woman – indeed a nation – in distress (6) . However what is intriguing, is that Savita Bhabi’s body, her markings of Indian-ness, her poses and postures are not examined to that extent either by the court or the public.</p>
<p>Pornography, as obscenity in its aggravated form or explicit depiction of sexual acts without a relevant or coherent narrative, has been dropped from both legal discourse and academic and cultural analysis--is it possible to surmise that this has happened because it can be read as a blank slate, a place where meanings cannot be read, felt or inferred? Pornographic movies are spliced into mainstream films, circulate
surreptitiously through video stores, piracy markets or though online
spaces that cannot be easily accessed because of regulations and
filters in most places –- colleges, homes, schools, offices, cybercafes
(7) etc. Can we surmise that the transaction of the sexualized gaze with the obscene object has been, in this way, so removed from public gaze that it does not merit discomfort and anxiety for the state or public, unless it nefariously slips into public discourse (DPS MMS, Noida MMS, Mysore Mallige)? As long as it is a secretive (even if mass) consumption, it does not disturb the heternormative familiar and familial in the manner that an object whose obscenity is not quite obvious or clear does – for example, HBO's English movie channel (8).</p>
<p>In this context, let us look at an excerpt from the progressive judgment on Hussain’s painting, which demonstrates the extent to which the court has to read the meanings of an image to determine whether it is obscene or not, but simultaneously, by not ever having to interact with a pornographic text, the court (or the public) does not have to see that there are many meanings embedded in such an image as well.</p>
<p><em>'One of the tests in relation to judging nude/semi nude pictures of women as obscene is also <strong>a particular posture or pose or the surrounding circumstances</strong> which may render it to be obscene, but in the present painting, apart from what is already stated above, the <strong>contours of the woman’s body represent nothing more than the boundaries/map of India.</strong><br /></em></p>
<p><em>Even if a different view had to be taken that if the painter wanted to depict India in human form, it may have been<strong> more appropriate to cloth the woman in some manner may be by draping a sari </strong>or by a flowing cloth etc., but that alone cannot be made a ground to prosecute the painter.</em> <em>There can be a numbers of postures or poses that one can think of which can really stimulate a man’s deepest hidden passions and desires. To my mind, art should not be seen in isolation without going into its onomatopoetic meaning and it is here I quote Mr. Justice Stewart of the US Supreme Court in Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964) who defined ‘obscenity’ as, “I will know it when I see it”. The nude woman in the impugned painting is not shown in any peculiar kind of a pose or posture nor are her surroundings so painted which may arouse sexual feelings or that of lust in the minds of the deviants in order to call it obscene. The </em><em><strong>placement of the Ashoka Chakra</strong> or the States in the painting
is also not on any particular body part of the woman which may be
deemed to show disrespect to the Ashoka Chakra/States and the same was
conceded by the learned counsel for the respondent during the course of
the arguments advanced. </em></p>
<p><em>It is possible that some persons may hold a more orthodox or conservative view on the depiction of Bharat Mata as nude in the painting but that itself would not suffice to give rise to a criminal prosecution of a person like the petitioner who may have more liberal thoughts in respect of mode and manner of depiction of Bharat Mata.' </em>(9)</p>
<p>A body that doesn’t carry inscriptions of cities on different body parts, but is definitely inscribed as Indian is that of Savita Bhabi – from the mangalsutra that never comes off even during doggy-style sex, the sari that slips off rather easily, the bindi, the gestures and mannerisms, to the stories that place her in sexual encounters with familiar people – the bra salesman, the old boyfriend, the cousin, the doctor, the woman colleague, the boss, the aging star and many others.</p>
<p>Savita Bhabhi thus carries as many confusing, jostling meanings as a pornographic text. For instance, she refers to recession and aspirations to become Miss India. She ventures into the fantasy world of her fans, since many of her stories are drawn from their stories on the Savita Bhabi website and fansite –- whether these stories are make-believe or true is irrelevant. These resonances of the text beyond mere sexual arousal are obvious. Even if one were to ignore Linda Williams (10) and inferences from Foucault that pornography becomes one of the many forms in which knowledge of pleasure is organised, it is obvious that from varied perspectives within film studies and legal studies, pornography merits examination. Williams' point also seems to provide some insight into why pornographic circulation doesn't merit much anxiety from the state or in the law; if pornography is organised in consonance with the heteronormative familiar and familial and accessible primarily by men, then maybe it is not such a big surprise that the state or the law is not really invested in controlling pornography, since pornography itself is controlling modes of sexuality and/or sexual expression.</p>
<p>Returning to the comparison, Hussain's untitled nude body on the map of India is literally marked. She carries these inscriptions -- Gujarat on one breast, Bangalore between her thighs, Chennai on her calves, Goa on her hip. Savita Bhabi is marked by her sari, her bindi, her blouse, her aesthetic sense, her fantasies of film stars, her stories of encounters in dressing rooms and myriad other recognizable details -- that mark her as Indian, or at least as living in India, in an Indian (albeit a privileged fair North Indian) body. However, it is Husain's untitled painting -- not called Bharat Mata (and the painting doesn't seem to signify a maternal relation but that of a wounded woman or pained woman) -- that goes to court on charges of obscenity.</p>
<p>Before looking at the few judgments that deal with the actual pornographic text, I take a detour to look at another iconic female figure -- that of Justice. Though clothed, she is blindfolded, so as to be able to discern even a fraction of a slip in the scales of justice; visual cognition would not be sufficient for her to recognise such a slip. As explained by Costas Douzinas, ('The Legality of the Image, lecture – December, 1999), ‘Justice must be blindfolded to avoid the temptation of facing the concrete person and putting individual characteristics before the abstract logic of the institution'. Martin Jay traces the trajectory of how justice became blindfolded through the ages, in the article 'Must Justice Be Blind' (11). Justice was initially wide-eyed and alert; she was blindfolded by the Fool in a period when corruption of the rulers was rampant; she was immortalised by Vermeer as staring at empty scales; and in a transitory state before being completely blinded she had two heads, with a pair of eyes that could see, and a pair that was blindfolded -- shielded, maybe, from the profane and from embarrassment.</p>
<p>I look at this blindness of the judicial system that allows pornography to circulate, while pinning down the obscene and examining minutely its various meanings. The obscene ('Satyam Shivam Sundarmam', 'Prajapati' – a Bengali magazine which carries short stories, 'Lady Chatterley’s Lover', 'Bandit Queen') is examined firstly, for whether it is so gross, though grossness or vulgarity as such is not enough to establish obscenity. And secondly, for whether it has the tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such influences and into whose hands -- or rather, vision -- such an object might fall (this is what allows for the circulation in limited publics -- adult audiences, time slots on television). <br /><br /><strong>Hard and Near Hard Pornography: Close Encounters of the Law with the Profane</strong></p>
<p>In the case of Anonymous vs. the Commissioner Of Police (12), yet another encounter takes place between the embarrassed law and the pornographic text. The excerpt below describes the encounter of two women advocates asked by the court to examine what movies are being exhibited at a specific theatre. In the peculiar clash of social mores, that ensure who has access to pornography, and the law, that ensures equal access to all legally sanctioned media to everyone, the movie theatre was held responsible for violating the fundamental right of women to have access to their premises -- and thus access to pornography. <br /><br /><em>'We approached the booking counter of Rs. 20/- and asked for tickets. The booking clerk first informed us that it is an English movie and it is not meant for ladies to view. When we insisted for tickets, he asked us to come inside the booking room from the main entrance of the theatre. When we were entering the theatre, the gate-man informed us that ladies are not permitted as it is a "SEX MOVIE".</em></p>
<p><em>However, we walked into the booking room. Booking clerk issued us Box-A tickets and further asked us to see the Manager before taking seats. We did not see the Manager but directly went to Box-A and took seats. Even the Box-A doorman asked us to leave the theatre advising us that we being ladies cannot see it as the movie is a "SEX MOVIE". When the movie began at 12.00 P.M. simultaneously the Manager along with two men switched on the lights in Box-A and asked us to leave the hall immediately. Since he repeatedly insisted us to leave, we both came out of Box-A. On coming out we enquired as to why we should not see the movie, to which the Manager replied that it is a "BF". On asking for further clarification of "BF", the Manager stated that it means "BLUE FILM". When we asked him to identify himself, he informed us that he is Mr. Prasad, Manager of the Theatre, as such he has every right to ask us to leave. When we asked as to how it was not advertised that the movie is meant for men only, he retorted that "It is understood that whenever English movies are played in this theatre, ladies are strictly not permitted." As such we were forced to leave the theatre immediately.'</em><br /><br />The question before the court was whether the films exhibited in this theatre were being exhibited in accordance with the censor certificate or whether there was any tampering; whether there was any other device or contrivance to interpolate or intermingle blue films with any otherwise innocent-looking film. Here, though the court had taken it upon itself to address the pornographic text, it ran into a series of complications when merely trying to access the text or the evidence itself, as two women advocates were sent to determine if there was an illegal film exhibition taking place. Pornography seems to be continuously disappearing even on the rare occasion when it is addressed directly by the court, especially in the court's attempt to precisely locate the moment of transaction of the gaze with the pornographic object.</p>
<p>The court, when allowed to examine the film exhibited, found that it was 'a hotch potch of short films, advertisement films, party propaganda films, Hindi and Telugu feature film bits'. (13) The court finally located the pornographic segments (squeezing breasts in a tub, cunnilingus, brutal murder scene) and the court’s comment was that 'normal scenes were replaced by sexy scenes'. The recommendation of those who examined the films that were ostensibly being spliced into <em>Secret Games 3</em> and <em>Dark Dancers</em> is that, 'The only course proper is not to permit entry into the country for such films which prima facie may be <strong>classified hard or near-hard</strong>'. Though the term near-hard is amusing and unique classification of pornography, maybe it's a Freudian slip by a judicial system caught between disgusted arousal and embarrassment.</p>
<p>Finally, in this judgment, the court had to acknowledge its own blindness -- that there is ‘some hole somewhere in the system so that even excised portions by the Censor Board of the films have found their way to the theatres’, including portions that were never passed through the censor certification process at all. <br /><strong><br />Whose Hard-On (or Near Hard-On) Are We Looking for: The Law in Its Search for the Profane</strong><br /><br />In 2005, two teenagers frolicking were captured on a mobile phone camera, and the clip circulated first through mobile phones and then subsequently on the internet. The clip sparked off a phenomenon of hidden camera and mobile phone clips -- a booming pornographic enterprise now on the internet. For a split second, it seemed as though any kind of desire could become pornographic, captured in an ubiquitous medium and transmitted throughout the country. That thrill and anxiety was possibly grasped at slightly in Anurag Kashyap’s <em>Dev.D</em>, where Chanda -- the prostitute, or the other of the good girl -- is the one depicted as the unknown girl who was part of the MMS clip. Very few films have been able to grasp the visceral embarrassment and immediacy of desire as <em>Dev.D</em> does, and it is possibly not the story of Chanda, but that of Paro that achieves this. Paro, who sends nude pictures of herself across continents; Paro, the cyber-sexer; Paro, the entirely relatable slut who cycles with a mattress across fields of mustard in small town Punjab because she desires sex.</p>
<p>After three and a half years (countless MMSs, one movie reference, and a few academic articles later) the court passes judgment in this case – of who possibly can be held liable for the circulation of the MMS clip online, and specifically its sale on Bazee.com (an eBay subsidiary) by an IIT student (Avnish Bajaj vs State on 29/5/2008 by Muralidhar J.). In this case, it is not the pornographic text that keeps slipping and eluding the grasp of the court; the problem is in the inability, especially in the age of the internet, to fix the transactions around such an object that is rapidly changing hands and circulating at an exponential speed through the internet.</p>
<p>The court is in a bind -- the wrong person is accused. Not the corporate body of Bazee but the CEO of Bazee himself (the boy is a juvenile so is facing lesser charges in the juvenile court). The court has the responsibility to fix the blame of the circulation of the obscene object on Avinash Bajaj, without being able to establish that there is any knowledge on his part about the existence of the clip. Though the court was able to establish that there was negligence on the part of Bazee in running the website (in spite of notification, the clip remained on sale for a whole working day after the complaint), and that the filters used by Bazee were obviously inadequate to control what is sold through the website, it was still not possible to find the CEO liable for obscenity charges. If the company had been charged, this would have been possible. Eventually, even though obscenity as a charge couldn’t stick, similar provisions in the IT Act (Section 67 read with Section 85) were used to charge Avinash Bajaj himself, as opposed to Bazee (the corporate body or the company itself). </p>
<p>Here again the court is forced to confront a pornographic text only in instances where there has been a public furore around it, and the eventual judgment is not likely to be able to even remotely address the phenomenon of MMS clips and hidden camera footage from cybercafes and hostels that has been spawned as a result of this incident. The slippery transaction of the gaze with the pornographic object is difficult to fix though in a different way from the earlier judgment – here the pornographic nature of the text is understood rather than examined, more for its violation of privacy than actual elements of obscenity. But it is still hard to determine for the law, especially with the internet, how and by whom has circulation of the pornographic object has taken place and to fix these transactions to ensure legal culpability.</p>
<p>*****<br />Curiously this tale of women advocates and judges as representatives of law and justice, who are averting their gaze from the pornographic text or find that the text is constantly eluding their legal stare, must deal in its closure with the figure of the male judge. Anne McClintock’s male judge in her article ‘Screwing the System’ (14) is a judge who gets a hard-on each time he sentences a prostitute -- a judge who otherwise pays to be beaten by the very same prostitutes. The Hidayatullah paradox of obscenity law is that the judge who decides on obscenity has to decide on the basis of whether he is affected, or rather aroused -- and if he is turned on, then how is he any longer the reasonable judge, or even the 'reasonable man' who can be expected to pass judgment with the dispassionate authority of law? The work of both Shrimoyee N. Ghosh (on the dance bar judgment) and Lawrence Liang (on cinema and the law) on the relation between law and affect, gestures towards an interesting puzzle for us to consider here: if we could look into the eyes of justice, if she were not blindfolded, what would we see? And is the purpose of the blindfold indeed to prevent us from observing the affective life of law itself – its arousal, disgust and embarrassment?</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Endnotes:</strong></p>
<p>1. Ranjit Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra. Only in the recent fairly progressive judgment on Hussain’s painting, that held eventually after examining it, that it was not obscene, was there an attempt at giving some distinction to the category of pornography apart from it being an aggravated form of obscenity and to say that it, as a class of objects, images, paintings, videos, is designed for sexual arousal, while other material which may or may not be obscene is meant to have other meanings. Such reading of the author’s intentions is a convoluted way of restating Justice Potter’s statement – 'I know it (hard core), when I see it'. <br />2. Fatima Riswana v. State Rep. By A.C.P., Chennai & Ors.Case No.: Appeal (crl.) 61-62 of 2005<br />3. -'…in a clear shift of subject matter, what we are now seeing is an explicitly politicized moral censor looking at all this—looking not so much at the sex industry as at society-in-general, at society itself now theatricalised into a morbid stage of sleaze'. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, in his essay ‘Is Realism Pornographic?,’ which deals with the writings of Pramod Navalkar, former Minister for Culture in Maharashtra, points to how explicit or hard-core pornography does not seem to be the concern as much as a whole range of practices attached to the phenomenon of modernity<br />4. Anastasia Guha, The Beatitudes Of A Bountiful Bhabhi, Tehelka, Vol 5, Issue 19, Dated May 17, 2008. Available online at http://www.tehelka.com/story_main39.asp?filename=hub170508the_beatitudes.asp <br />5. Savitha Bhabi threatened, http://infotech.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/3476748.cms <br />6. For instance, the court held that in Bandit Queen, the nudity during the sequence of rape and torture of Phoolan Devi is necessary in the narrative and essential for the impact and the moral that the story is trying to convey – her anger with the upper caste feudal landlords and her quest for justice become identifiable for the viewer, and hence the nudity is in fact necessary in the story, and has no ‘tendency to deprave or corrupt’.<br />7. The regulation of cybercafes takes place in a manner reminiscent of how cinema spaces such as movie theatres were sought to be regulated by the colonial law. Current laws demand placing of computers so monitors face outward, use of identity cards for every visit, data retention for at least a month for most users, etc. <br />8. Though the latter might be a valid assumption (and certainly beneficial for us) it is an assumption whose presumptuous certainties are shaken in the age of the internet, especially that primarily men access pornography and cyber sex through these newly opening up online spaces.<br />9. Maqbool Fida Husain v. Raj Kumar Pandey CRL. REVISION PETITION No. 114/2007. Decided on 08-05-2008</p>
<p>10. Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989<br />11. Costas Douzinas, Lynda Nead (Eds), Law and the Image: the Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law. University of Chicago Press, 1999<br />12. Anonymous Letter-Un-Signed vs The Commissioner Of Police And Others on 26 December, 1996<br />13. For a judicial system that is invested in narrative film or narrative structure for reasons of copyright law (see generally Anne Baron, The Legal Property of Film) or for aesthetic reasons, as is evident from the judgment in Bandit Queen (that held nudity when she was paraded naked in front of the villagers to not be obscene because those scenes are needed for a narrative impact – for people to feel moved and disgusted by Phoolan Devi’s plight) it must also be a different kind of horror to find films chopped up into twenty sundry pieces, the last piece thrown somewhere else.<br />14. Anne McClintock, Screwing the System: Sexwork, Race and the Law, Boundary 2, Vol. 19, No. 2, Feminism and Postmodernism (Summer, 1992), 70-95. <br /><br /></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/the-blindfolded-gaze-of-the-law-and-pornography'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/the-blindfolded-gaze-of-the-law-and-pornography</a>
</p>
No publishernamitahistories of internet in IndiaObscenityinternet and societyArtcybercultureswomen and internetYouTubeCyberculturescyberspacesDigital subjectivitiesHistory2011-08-02T08:37:23ZBlog EntryCyberspace in its Plurality: Cybercultures Workshop at TISS, Mumbai
http://editors.cis-india.org/publications-automated/curricula/courses-taught-and-designed-by-cis/cyberspace-in-its-plurality-cybercultures-workshop-at-tiss-mumbai
<b>Cyberspace has become one of the most potent and persuasive metaphors of our times, enveloping and embracing a wide range and scope of areas across disciplines and perspectives. The cybercultures workshop is designed to be an introduction to the multiplicity of cyberspaces and internet technologies and the key questions which have emerged in the almost four decades of cyberculture theory. The workshop is designed across four days; each day dealing with a certain understanding of cyberspace – in its materiality, in its imagination, in its instrumentality – in order to present a comprehensive view of the vast terrain of cyberspace and its intersections with the contemporary worlds we live in.</b>
<h3>Workshop @ Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, TISS, Mumbai<br /></h3>
<p>The four day workshop at the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.comminit.com/en/node/265160">Centre for Media and
Cultural Studies</a>, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, sees CIS engaging with one of the most exciting spaces in the Indian
academia; we design and administer an introduction course on
cyberspace and its plurality to students of media and cultural
studies. The workshop is a part of the Centre for Internet and
Society's larger concern on providing a multidisciplinary,
multi-media approach towards the internet and contextualising it in
India.</p>
<p>Structured on a seminar model, the workshop hopes to
bring together the questions in academic debate as well as in the
realm of cultural production, for students to understand the internet
technologies and cyberspaces as not only important cultural outputs
but also crucial forms that shape the world we live in.</p>
<p><strong>Objectives:</strong>
The four day cybercultures workshop hopes to achieve the following
objectives:</p>
<ol><li>To introduce the students
to the multiplicity and complexity of ‘cyberspace’.</li><li>To introduce ‘cyberspace’
as an epistemological category to emphasise the centrality of
cyberspaces in understanding the mechanics of urban survival in the
contemporary.</li><li>To orient the students
towards understanding the textuality of cyberspace; rescuing it from
the confines of digital networks and locating it in the transactions
of globalization and urbanization in Asia.</li><li>To introduce the key
debates in cybercultures theory: body, gender, sexuality, authorship,
ownership, access and information democratization.</li></ol>
<p><strong>Design:</strong>
The cybercultures workshop is designed to be conducted over four days with two
sessions (of three hours each) per day. Each day is thematically divided to
look at a particular idea of cyberspace; the sessions are further
sub-divided to introduce a particular perspective on the day’s
theme. Each session has its set of individual pre-readings which will
serve more as indicators of the stake of the debate rather than as texts around which the class will be centred. The readings shall remain as introductory
material, and the class room discussions, while referring to them,
will not concentrate on explaining the material.</p>
<h3>Day 1: Cyberspace – Form, Textuality and Frameworks</h3>
<blockquote>
<h3>Session 1: Exploring Cyberspace:</h3>
<p>Definitions, explanations, locations</p>
<p>Cyberspace and Digital Technologies</p>
<p>Form, text, textuality</p>
<p><strong>Pre-reading: </strong> Shah, Nishant, 2005. “Playblog:
Pornography, Performance, and Cyberspace” available<a class="external-link" href="http://www.cut-up.com/news/issuedetail.php?sid=413&issue=20"> here</a></p>
<h3>Session 2: The Digital DNA – Database, Networks,
Archives</h3>
<p>The Database Imperative: Sorting, information,
databases</p>
<p>The Networking Impulse: Social Networking Systems and
the condition of networking</p>
<p>The Archiving Aspirations: Intention, aspiration and
archiving the present</p>
<p><strong>Pre-reading:</strong> Manovich, Lev, 2001. “The
Database as a Symbolic Form” available <a class="external-link" href="http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/archive/courses/warner/english197/Schedule_files/Manovich/Database_as_symbolic_form.htm">here</a></p>
</blockquote>
<h3>Day 2: Information technology and
human engineering</h3>
<blockquote>
<h3><strong>Session 3 : Gender, Technology and Cyberspace</strong></h3>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Gendering of Technology; Gendered Technologies</p>
<p>The body and its boundaries</p>
<p>Physical bodies; Digital selves; cyborgs</p>
<p><strong>Pre-reading: </strong>Light, Jennifer, 1999. “When Computers Were Women” available<a class="external-link" href="http://tinyurl.com/Jennifer-light"> here</a></p>
<p>Dibbell, Julian, 1991. “A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a
Haitian Trickster, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a
Database into a Society” available <a class="external-link" href="http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle_vv.html">here</a></p>
<h3> Session 4: Techno-social Worlds</h3>
<p> Orkut Deaths : The distributed self</p>
<p> Role playing and identity : The real and the authentic</p>
<p> DPS MMS: The trajectories of selves</p>
</blockquote>
<h3>Day 3- 4 : Cyberspace and the
Infobahn</h3>
<blockquote>
<h3>Session 5: Movie Screening: <a class="external-link" href="http://www.goodcopybadcopy.net/">Good Copy, Bad Copy</a>
(followed by discussion) <br /></h3>
<h3>Session 6: Who owns Cyberspace?</h3>
<p>Ownership and Possession</p>
<p>Licensing and access</p>
<p>Open source and the gift economy</p>
<p><strong>Pre-reading:</strong> UNCTAD essay on copyright and related
questions, available <a class="external-link" href="http://www.unctad.org/en/docs/iteipc200610_en.pdf">here</a></p>
<h3>Session 7: 18 Reasons Why Piracy is Good for You</h3>
<p>The need for piracy</p>
<p>Piracy, theft, and property</p>
<h3>Session 8: The Cultural Value of Intellectual
Property</h3>
<p>The Digital Millenium Rights</p>
<p>The Copy Right and the Copy Left</p>
<p>Open Access and the Creative Commons</p>
</blockquote>
<p> Outputs</p>
<ol><li><a class="external-link" href="http://community.livejournal.com/authenticpirate/">http://community.livejournal.com/authenticpirate/</a></li><li><a class="external-link" href="http://myspaceformusic.livejournal.com/">http://myspaceformusic.livejournal.com/</a></li><li><a class="external-link" href="http://jennyontherocks.livejournal.com/">http://jennyontherocks.livejournal.com/</a></li></ol>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/publications-automated/curricula/courses-taught-and-designed-by-cis/cyberspace-in-its-plurality-cybercultures-workshop-at-tiss-mumbai'>http://editors.cis-india.org/publications-automated/curricula/courses-taught-and-designed-by-cis/cyberspace-in-its-plurality-cybercultures-workshop-at-tiss-mumbai</a>
</p>
No publishernishantcyberculturesteachingcyberspacespedagogyeducationdigital pluralism2008-10-31T10:38:17ZBlog EntryResearchers At Work
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/cisraw-faq
<b>CIS-RAW stands for Researchers at Work, a multidisciplinary research initiative by the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. CIS firmly believes that in order to understand the contemporary concerns in the field of Internet and Society, it is necessary to produce local and contextual accounts of the interaction between the internet and socio-cultural and geo-political structures. The CIS-RAW programme hopes to produce one of the first documentations on the transactions and negotiations, relationships and correlations that the emergence of internet technologies has resulted in, specifically in the South. The CIS-RAW programme recognises ‘The Histories of the Internet and India’ as its focus for the first two years. Although many disciplines, organisations and interventions in various areas deal with internet technologies, there has been very little work in documenting the polymorphous growth of internet technologies and their relationship with society in India. The existing narratives of the internet are often riddled with absences or only focus on the mainstream interests of major stakeholders, like the state and the corporate. We find it imperative to excavate the three-decade histories of the internet to understand the contemporary concerns and questions in the field.</b>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/cisraw-faq'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/cisraw-faq</a>
</p>
No publishernishanthistories of internet in Indiainternet and societygeeksdigital subjectivescyborgscyberculturesarchivescyberspacespedagogyresearchwomen and internete-governance2012-01-04T05:27:06ZPageHistories of the Internet
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/histories-of-the-internets-main
<b>For the first two years, the CIS-RAW Programme shall focus on producing diverse multidisciplinary histories of the internet in India.</b>
<p><strong>Histories of internets in India</strong></p>
<p align="justify">The CIS-RAW programme is designed around two-year thematics. Every two years, we shall, looking at our engagement and the questions that are emerging around us, come up with new themes that we would like to commission, enable and encourage research on.</p>
<p align="justify">The selection of the theme of the History of Internet and Society is a unanimous decision made by our researchers in-house, the members of the Society, distinguished fellows, supporters, and peers who all gathered for a launch workshop for the CIS. There is a severe dearth of material on the histories of Internet and Society in India and we find it necessary to contextualise and historicise the contemporary in order to fruitfully and critically engage with the questions and concerns we are committed to. In the first two years of its programme, the CIS-RAW hopes to come up with alternative histories of the Internet and Society, which chart a wide terrain of the field that we are engaging with and produce one of the first such resources for researchers working in this field.</p>
<p align="justify"><strong>Scope of the Theme:</strong></p>
<p align="justify">We are looking at a wide range of accounts of the different forms, imaginations, materialities and interactions of the internets in India. As we excavate its three-decade growth in India, it becomes increasingly clear that there is no homogenised Internet that has evolved in the country; Instead, what we have is a technology, which, through its interactions and intersections with various objects, people, contexts and regulation, has emerged in many different ways. The theme of 'Histories of internets in India' hopes to address these pluralities of the internets and how they have been shaped in the unfolding of these technologies.</p>
<p align="justify">We have collaborated on the following histories with different researchers in India:</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<ol>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/rewiring-bodies/" class="external-link">Rewiring Bodies</a> - Asha Achuthan, Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Sciences, Bangalore.</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/archives-and-access/" class="external-link">Archive and Access</a> - Rochelle Pinto (Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore; Aparna Balachandran, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore; and Abhijit Bhattacharya, Centre for Sudies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/law-video-and-technology" class="external-link">Porn: Law, Video & Technology</a> - Namita Malhotra, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/transparency-and-politics-blog" class="external-link">Transparency and Politics</a> - Zainab Bawa, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/the-last-cultural-mile-blog" class="external-link">The Last Cultural Mile</a> - Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/revolution-2.0/revolution-2.0-blog" class="external-link">Using the Net for Social Change</a> - Anja Kovacs, (Research) Fellow, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/queer-histories-of-the-internet/queer-histories-of-the-internet-blog" class="external-link">Queer Histories of the Internet</a> - Nitya Vasudevan, Centre for Study of Culture and Society and Nithin Manayath, Mount Carmel College</li><li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities-blog" class="external-link">Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities</a> - Pratyush Shankar, Center for Environmental Planning and Technology University, Ahmedabad</li><li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/gaming-and-gold/gaming-and-gold-blog" class="external-link">Gaming and Gold</a> - Arun Menon, Centre for Internet & Society<br /></li></ol>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/histories-of-the-internets-main'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/histories-of-the-internets-main</a>
</p>
No publishernishanthistories of internet in Indiainternet and societygeeksdigital subjectivescyborgscyberculturesarchivescyberspacespedagogyresearchwomen and internete-governance2015-03-30T14:15:10ZPageResearch Programmes
http://editors.cis-india.org/research/research-programmes
<b>The Research Portfolio at the Centre for Internet and Society seeks to develop new pedagogic practices, plural and unique knowledges, multidisciplinary perspectives, and reflexive interventions in the field of Internet and Society. </b>
<h3><strong>Context</strong></h3>
<p align="left">We
work on the premise that very little work has gone into understanding
or exploring the internets in their plurality, leading to
simultaneous mythification and demonisation of the internet. However, instead
of trying to define what the internet means or enumerating its many
manifestations, the Centre for Internet and Society
is invested in producing new pedagogical devices and frameworks to
analyse the various layers of the internet as it interacts with
socio-cultural and geo-political contexts.</p>
<div align="left"> </div>
<p align="left">Most
frameworks that address questions of Internet and Society work with
borrowed terminologies (of older technologies and technological
forms) and institutional perspectives (arising out of traditional
disciplines and interventions of earlier paradigms) that are no
longer adequate for serious engagement with the complex relationship
between internet and society. We
recognise three dominant strains that are influential in most of the
research and intervention in the field of Internet and Society.</p>
<p align="left">The
first is a focus on the science and technologies of the internet -- looking at innovation, experimentation and development of the
technologies to build a faster, more effective and more robust web of
applications and protocols. The second is a sustained philosophical
engagement that explores the aesthetic and ethical implications of
the digital worlds, networks, communities and identities that cyberspaces evolve. The third is an instrumental approach to
technology that focuses on the effects of the internet and its growth as well as
the potential it has for further development and impact.</p>
<div align="left"> </div>
<p align="left">These
approaches create a schism between internet technologies and social structures, obscuring the inextricable nature of their
intertwining. The focus is either on the purely technological, where
the social fades into the background, or on the severely
socio-cultural, where internet technologies are looked upon
merely as instrumental in nature. The
Centre for Internet and Society, instead of making this either-or
choice, seeks to invest its energies in emphasising and excavating
the processes, transactions, negotiations and mechanics by which internet technologies engage with society.</p>
<div align="left"> </div>
<h3 align="left" style="text-align: justify;"><strong>CIS
Research Programmes</strong></h3>
<p align="justify">The
Research Portfolio currently houses three different research
programmes, each aimed at different audiences and researchers:</p>
<ol><li><strong><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/research/cis-raw" class="internal-link" title="CIS-RAW">The
CIS-RAW</a>:</strong> The Centre for Internet and Society’s Researchers At
Work programme encourages innovative ideas and perspectives that
emerge from dialogue and exchange, structured around a theme that
changes every two years. The CIS-RAW is targeted at <strong><em>established
scholars</em></strong> willing to engage with the specific themes that CIS is
immediately interested in. It offers full financial support towards
quantified academic productions. To know more about the CIS-RAW
programme, please <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/research/cis-raw" class="internal-link" title="CIS-RAW">click here</a>.</li><li><strong><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/research/ict4arts" class="internal-link" title="ICT4Arts">The ICT4A Fellowships</a>:</strong> The Centre for Internet and Society
recognises that some of the most innovative ideas and experiments
with philosophical concepts and practice based projects are in the
intersections between Information and Communication Technologies and
the Creative Arts. Artists experimenting with form, shape,
installations, processes and pedagogy create significant projects
with high intervention and public value while forcing us to revisit
the relationship between the internet and society. The ICT4A (Internet
and Creative Technologies of Art) Fellowships are for <strong><em>artists</em></strong>
who are interested in examining the
aesthetics, politics and pragmatics of internet technologies and
their relationships with different socio-cultural and geo-political
phenomena. To know more about the ICT4A Fellowships, please <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/research/ict4arts" class="internal-link" title="ICT4Arts">click
here</a>.</li><li><strong><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/research/projects-inception-grant" class="internal-link" title="Collaborative Projects Programme">Collaborative Projects Programme:</a></strong> CIS sees its role as that of an enabler and think
tank for new ideas, methods and frameworks within the field of Internet and Society. Given
the scope of internet technologies and the persuasive way in which
they embrace various facets of contemporary life, we envision various
disciplines engaging with the concerns of Internet and Society in the
future. The Collaborative Project Programme is structured to provide
initial head-space, ideation resources, and intellectual
infrastructure to <strong><em>senior researchers and/or practitioners</em></strong> to work
towards a larger project that intersects with our vision. The Collaborative Projects Programme offers CIS an opportunity to enter into a financial, intellectual and administrative collaboration for up to six months with individuals or organisations who are
looking at funding for the inception work towards a project
(research, intervention, or otherwise) in the field of Internet and
Society. To learn more about the modalities, CIS’ involvement and
the nature of support for the Collaborative Projects, please <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/research/projects-inception-grant" class="internal-link" title="Projects Inception Grant">click
here</a>.</li></ol>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/research/research-programmes'>http://editors.cis-india.org/research/research-programmes</a>
</p>
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