Centre for Internet and Society

Where's My Data? Submission for Knight News Challenge 2015

sumandro — 2015-10-05T15:00:16Z

We are very excited to be contribute to a join submission with DataMeet and Oorvani for the Knight News Challenge 2015. We are proposing "an application for users to search for locally-relevant data, discuss missing data, demand data, explore and respond to data demands by others, and start data crowd-sourcing exercises." Please go to the submission page and support our project. The text of the proposal is available below. It was prepared by Nisha Thompson of DataMeet, Meera K of Oorvani, and I. The 'Where's My Data' banner is created by Nisha using icons from the Noun Project.

Please support our project by visiting and 'applauding' it on the Knight News Challenge website: https://www.newschallenge.org/challenge/data/entries/where-s-my-data. You will have to log in to the website though, apologies for that.

Where's My Data? Search, Demand, and Collect Data

In one sentence, describe your idea as simply as possible.

An application for users to search for locally-relevant data, discuss missing data, demand data, explore and respond to data demands by others, and start data crowd-sourcing exercises.

Full Description

The proposed application aims to solve two key problems in accessing reliable data faced by citizens, journalists, and researchers. The first problem is knowing where a required data set can be found, and the second problem is collecting the required data set if it does not exist in the first place.

Many individual initiatives have been developed to collect specific data. For example, Powercuts (http://powercuts.in/) was a Ushahidi installation to crowd-source data using Twitter, Kiirti (http://www.kiirti.org/) was used to map complaints about auto drivers, IChangeMyCity (http://www.ichangemycity.com/) is a platform that collects general complaints from around Bangalore. However, these apps were either short lived because they could not sustain their one premise or they do not give insight into what people want to know and what data is important to them. Also, they often did not open up this data to be used by others, beyond visualisations offered on the sites.

Citizens have many questions regarding their urban surroundings - how much water is coming to the neighbourhood daily, where are the waste pick up trucks, what is the status of a road repairing process, etc, the answers require data that either is difficult to get or doesn't answer their query in the way they want. Journalists and researchers are also interested in collecting and analysing these same data sets. A one off platform for one issue won't properly represent the demand for information in modern day (data starved) India.

For example, a local residents’ group wanted to impress on their elected rep the seriousness of the incidence of a disease, as the local government was not taking concrete steps to manage the emerging epidemic. In the absence of official data on suspected cases of illness, this application could help them to reach out through e-mails and social media networks to do a quick survey on how many residents or their family members have got affected.

The application will not only make it easier to undertake such crowd-sourcing efforts, but also to share the data back and make it open for usage by others, including journalists and researchers.

We are already building an Urban Open Data Platform for Bengaluru, India. The application will allow searching this portal and any other such portal, especially if any is developed by the municipality. It will also pipe the crowd-sourced data to this Urban Open Data Platform.

This tool will reduce duplication of data gathering, gives data a longer shelf life and acts as a source of public data that feeds into a city-wide urban Open Data Portal under development by a consortium that we are part of.

How will the Application Work?

The application will allow the user to search for data across the data catalogues connected to the application.
If the data is not found, the user can post details about the required data, which other users in her/his networks can see and comment on. They can either point the person towards an existing data set, or support the need to collect the data being demanded.
When the user finds out that the data set s/he needs does not exist, the application will allow her/him to start a crowd-sourcing exercise, using various channels such as e-mails, social media posts, web-based questionnaires, etc.
For each of these channels, a separate plug-in will be developed so as to open up the software development process. For this project, we will focus on developing plug-ins for two channels: 1) questionnaires integrated with the Citizen Matters website, and 2) use tweets to collect replies using a unique hashtag.
User can share the crowd-sourcing request within her/his own social networks, or use one of the groups (say, the Citizen Matters group focusing on local journalism, or the DataMeet group focusing on open data enthusiasts in the city) to share their calls for data collection.

Briefly Describe the Need that You're Trying to Address

A common cry in Indian cities is the lack of datasets required to understand issues, either at local or at national scales. This tool will be the place to voice demands, ask others about potential sources, or an easy way to create data sourcing activities.This will enable journalists, advocacy organisations, and researchers to search for data and help others to find the data they are looking for. It also records demands for non-existing data and helps take initiatives to collect such data.

What Progress have You Made so Far?

The team is already working on an Urban Open Data Platform, that will host public data, and a data catalog. We have already executed a few crowd-sourcing projects, and helped develop tools for journalists and researchers interested in civic issues.A data source search tool has been in development in the form of Open Data JSON <https://github.com/datameet/opendata.json>. A Bangalore focused data catalog has been in use for awhile as well and provides a base of data to use for people’s search <http://openbangalore.org>.

What would be a Successful Outcome for Your Project?

Success for this project means having a better understanding of what information is needed most by people and what data is required. We will gain detailed evidence regarding what kind of data people want. This entails a collection of questions, who is asking and from where, and what data gaps exist. The number of crowdsourcing projects initiated shows the intensity of the need, and how comfortable citizens are asking for data and proactively starting a data collection project.

Please List your Team Members and their Relevant Experience/Skills

Meera K, Oorvani Foundation, a media group who will provide editorial support to curate data, dissemination of data or queries, and audience reach. Nisha Thompson and Thejesh GN, from DataMeet, open data community, who will provide the technology and community aspects of the tool. Sumandro Chattapadhyay of the Centre for Internet and Society, will help planning the project and linking the effort with other Indian and global initiatives in open data and development.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/wheres-my-data-submission-for-knight-news-challenge-2015

The Many Lives and Sites of Internet in Bhubaneswar

Sailen Routray — 2015-09-21T05:36:18Z

This post by Sailen Routray is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Sailen is a researcher, writer, editor and translator who lives and works in Bhubaneswar. In this essay, he takes a preliminary step towards capturing some of the experiences of running and using internet cafes, experiences that lie at the interstices of (digital) objects and spaces, that are at the same time a history of the internet as well as a personal history of the city.

The Cybercafé in Bhubaneswar: A Very Personal Introduction

Till about ten years back perhaps, mustard-yellow coloured STD booths were as common a part of the Indian urban ecosystem as the common crow. But, as of the middle of 2015, the apparently ever ubiquitous STD booth seems to have gone the way of the sparrow, not yet extinct, but rare enough to evoke a visceral pang of nostalgia whenever one comes across a straggling specimen. But nostalgia is perhaps the wrong word to describe the emotion of ‘missing’ a STD booth in a city like Bhubaneswar.

The emotion that such urban change evokes in one is perhaps better described by the Odia word moha-maya (which is a combination of two words – maya and moha) which can connote everything from pity to longing to irrational attachment that causes pain. For this writer, more than the STD booth, what causes the most serious pang of moha-maya are the rapidly disappearing cybercafes, although the latter have not quite evaporated so completely as the STD booth.

This might not sound like too much of a loss for those on the right side of thirty. But to some of us (belonging to what Palash Krishna Mehrotra categorised as ‘The Butterfly Generation’ in the eponymous book) inching towards our first hiccups of an early middle age, this will be just another wry reminder of mortality; all things will fade away, including yours truly.

I do not remember the first day I accessed the internet. Perhaps the experience was not very startling; I like many others in my generation, I lie between the two Indian extremes to technological innovations – the blind fascination welded with incompetence that characterises so much of the generation of the midnight’s children, and the blind acceptance of all technological innovations by the generation born in the 1990s and 2000s. I, for example, also do not remember the first time I used a telephone. But I do remember for sure, that it was at our Sailashree Vihar home (in Bhubaneswar), to which we shifted in October 1992; because, one remembers for sure that one did not have a telephone connection before then.

Similarly, I remember where I accessed the internet for the first time, although the details of that first interface escape me now. It was a place called PAN-NET (or was it PLANNET? I can’t be sure; my memory, unfortunately, is like a bamboo sieve; it holds things, but not too much and not for very long) on the edge of the IMFA park in Shahid Nagar. Within a year of this, at least three cybercafés had opened shop near my house in Sailashree Vihar in the Chandrasekharpur area in North Bhubaneswar.

The Semi-Public Internet

Thus, my first experience of accessing the internet, like the majority of Indians of my generation perhaps, was at a ‘public’ place, a cybercafé. What happened as a result, was that the idea of accessing the internet, and not only its usage, as a communal exercise, got embedded deeply inside one’s mind; one saw the internet as a public utility and its usage as public/semi-public acts.

Sasikanta Bose (name changed), a student of philosophy, feels in a similar way. He learnt to use computers and the internet in cybercafés in the Jagamohan Nagar area, near his college in Bhubaneswar. As a regular writer for webzines earlier, he could not have functioned without these. Although now he accesses the internet through a cable connection and a laptop at home, he still uses cybercafés for taking printouts and for scanning. Over the last few years, Facebook is an additional reason for him to be on the World Wide Web, and he is more comfortable accessing Facebook at home, rather than in a cybercafé. But his primary reason for accessing the net remains to access webzines and reading material on the internet, and he feels this is done much more efficiently at a cybercafé since there is an immediate monetary pressure to get the most returns on the money that one is spending. The cybercafé that he uses the most is EXCEL in Sailashree Vihar.

The Case of ‘EXCEL’

EXCEL is a cybercafé established in the year 2001. Mr. Susant Kumar Behera and Mr. Sukant Kumar Behera (two brothers) are the proprietors. It is located on the ground floor of a house in the sixth phase of Sailashree Vihar. It must be mentioned here in passing that Sailashree Vihar is a strange new locality in Bhubaneswar initially planned and constructed by the Odisha State Housing Board; strange, like a lot of other things that came into being in the 1980s. It has only two ‘phases’, phase six and phase seven; I do not think even the Housing Board knows where the other five phases have meandered off to.

EXCEL is located on a service road parallel to the main arterial road of Sailashree Vihar that divides the sixth and the seventh phases. When Excel opened, it was opened primarily as a communication center with the cybercafé and the STD-PCO booth as the mainstays of the family concern. The STD booth reached its peak in 2004 and was almost dead by 2006-2007; the increasingly ubiquitous mobile phone effectively killed the PCO business. A coin-operated system was operational till very recently; it was discontinued in 2013. With the death of the PCO booth, EXCEL moved into the mobile voucher business for pre-paid mobiles; but with only two percent commission being offered by most service providers, this is a high-turnover but low-profit business for the shop, and has not been able to replace the revenues and profits of the PCO business.

Mr. Susant Behera (Bunu bhai to most of his customers and to me as well; and he also happens to be a close friend of one my closest schoolmate’s family friend), says that when they started the cybercafé business, they were very anxious to be a ‘different’ kind of player. Most cybercafés in Bhubaneswar, then offered primarily the illicit joys of pornography as their primary attraction. This was reflected in the very design of the cybercafés; most cybercafés were designed in the form of small cabins with often curtains on their small doors, and the computer screens faced the wall. Therefore, when EXCEL opened shop, I remember it being a refreshingly new kind of cybercafé. All the monitors were placed on reverse ‘U’ shaped tables with the backs of the monitors facing the wall, and the monitor screens facing out towards everyone; there was thus, no privacy. But this completely removed the sleaze that was then associated with cybercafés and the internet, and made the cybercafé popular with new social groups using the internet, such as single young women. EXCEL was and still remains popular with young women as a node for accessing the internet.

Now EXCEL is a very different kind of space from the time I remember it from my college days (1999-2002). It was, even then, popular with the young. But now it is much more of a safe hang-out place for college going young adults and those who have newly joined the work force, with fast moving snacks items such as puffs (called ‘patties’ in Bhubaneswar) and rolls, and ice cream being sold at the shop. It is much more of tuck shop now, with national and international brands of packaged food such as Haldiram and Nestle fighting for rack space. This transformation started in 2003 itself, two years into the opening the business; but whereas earlier EXCEL was primarily a PCO booth and cybercafé where one could get something to eat, it is primary a tuck shop these days. The shop also functions as a travel agent now, and books all kinds of bus, train and flight tickets.

The cybercafé still remains important for this family business and contributes around 20% of its total profits; but this is down from an all-time high of 50-60% in 2006-07 and from 30% when the business started in 2001. In the last ten years, the capacity of the café has come down by ten computers, and now it operates with only six systems; till 2010, the café had 20 systems, and by 2012, the number had decreased to 14. A large part of the revenue is now from the ancillary services provided by the cybercafé, such as scanning and printing; data does not drive the business any longer. Even the six systems now operational in EXCEL stay unused for some parts of the day; it operates at full capacity only in the evenings. During the day, often half of the systems lie idle and unused. But the cybercafé in EXCEL has other roles in the family business; it often provides an entry into other services such as ticketing that are offered; often a customer who steps into the shop to take printouts in the cybercafé, ends up buying a recharge voucher for her pre-paid mobile connection, or picks up a family pack of ice-cream for her home.

Imagining a World without Cybercafés

Ajay Kumar Puhan (28, from Jajpur district), who works at EXCEL, feels that cybercafés in their present form will survive only for another three to four years. After that period of time they just might survive as glorified ‘printout and scanning’ cafes. He has worked for around nine years at Excel, across the last ten years, since he was 18 years old. Now he is simultaneously studying and is in the final stages of finishing his diploma in mechanical engineering. According to him, the customer profile has drastically changed over the last ten years; only those who cannot and/or do not access the internet through mobile devices come to the cybercafé for their browsing needs. Students also drive demand for the café with their needs for filling up forms. He feels that the situation is very similar in his village as well, with almost everyone who can afford a smart phone has one with an internet pack.

This decline in the cybercafé component of the family business in EXCEL is reflective of a larger churning in the business. Ten years back there were around ten cybercafés in the greater Sailashree Vihar area. Now only three survive, of which EXCEL is one. Elsewhere in Bhubaneswar, the story is a similar one; often cybercafés have added additional services such as photocopiers or have transformed into gaming stations to survive as businesses. This change has been driven by fundamental transformations in the ways in which the internet is accessed in the country and in the city. Mobile phones have become the dominant device for accessing the internet in Bhubaneswar (and in India), and this has had significant effects on cybercafés in the city. The gentrification of many parts of the city and the consequently increasing rents for commercial property, and increases in wages of attendants at the cafes, are the other reasons why cybercafés are increasingly going the way of PCO-STD booths in the city.

Now, the Semi-Private Internet

Rahul (name changed) uses EXCEL very infrequently. But when he was a student in a big engineering college four years back, he used to sometimes go to the bunch of cyber cafes dotting the area surrounding his college in South-west Bhubaneswar. His visits were infrequent; he would go to a cyber café for some project related work, to quickly check his Facebook account, or to get his fix of porn. Even when internet was available at home, the cybercafés offered a sense of freedom because of the anonymity of the interface.

There was very little regulation of the cybercafés a few years back, and one could get a cabin and access the net without any identity proof. One could have anonymous chats, browse for pornography and watch it in the semi-privacy of a cubicle, or get one’s dose of social networking sites (sometimes registered in a fake name) without the usual fears when one does these from one’s private connecting devices.

But his accessing the internet through the cybercafés was more often than not a very hesitant activity. Quite a few times there would be people making out in the next cabin; more often than not, these would be seniors or batch-mates from his college. In those days cybercafés were infamous for being places where girls and boys, often college students, with no other place to hang out in, would indulge in some heavy duty necking and petting. The owners of the cafes were aware of what was happening. But they would not interfere, as that would mean turning away customers. Raul did not have a problem with people making out in a cabin that shared the same partition as his cubicle; but, he would feel odd and get a nagging feeling as if he was intruding.

For Rahul. The semi-publicity of the cyber-café was manifested by its obverse – semi-privacy. He sometimes misses the hothouse atmosphere of the cybercafés of yore, when you could slice the sexual charge in their atmosphere with a scythe, and reap private moments in ‘public’ places. He has not searched for a cybercafé with any urgency in a long time, because he does not need them for his project work; and his smart phone answers his social networking needs. But he feels a certain moha-maya for the semi-privacies of the internet that existed outside the fully private smartphone and the laptop.

Conclusion

Moha in sankrit means everything from infatuation, delusion, lack of discrimination, ignorance and falling into error, that are captured in the Odia word as well. The word maya also captures all these meanings in both English and Odia. And moha is a vice, for both Shankara and Buddha. It is a vice for Odia saints such as Achyutananda Das and Arakkhita Das as well, spanning the whole pre-modern experience from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Moha-maya is a feeling, a condition that one has to overcome to arrive at true knowledge – knowledge that simultaneously provides insights into the self and the world. Hence, to be free from moha-maya one needs to stay in the moment; any moha-maya for the past therefore, is supposed to be spiritually debilitating. Therefore, the Odia relationship with the past is a complicated one. One has to honour tradition; yet, one has to be free of moha-maya of the particular, peculiar, material manifestations of the tradition, of the past. This applies as much to dead relatives, as to disappearing socio-technological forms such as the STD booth and the cyber-cafes.

With the attack on the cybercafé continuing in all these various fronts, it is highly unlikely that it will survive into the third decade of the twenty-first century. But like other attacks on communally shared, semi-public/semi-private social spaces, these attacks of ‘inevitable’ forces of technology and market need to be resisted. But there are no easy answers as to how to go about doing it. As for me, even though I have a laptop and a couple of data cards (one personal, and the other official) through which I access the internet, even when I do not have the need to scan or print, I pay a routine weekly visit to the neighbourhood cybercafé. Token gesture, I know; but when one is fighting forces that are infinitely larger than oneself, one perhaps has to resort to all kinds instruments of resistance, including the token, ‘weapons of the weak’. One cannot eliminate death, but one can definitely prolong life. Especially, when the final moha-maya is for life itself.

The post is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, and copyright is retained by the author.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_the-many-lives-and-sites-of-internet-in-bhubaneswar

Bangalore's new champions for culture

praskrishna — 2012-09-07T08:59:59Z

The hundred and ninth imprint of TimeOut Bengaluru edition is dedicated to a group of people who TimeOut believes are playing critical roles in determining the cultural contours of this city, and are the new champions for the arts and culture in Bangalore. Lawrence Liang, founder of Alternative Law Forum is one of them.

Click to read the original published by TimeOut Bengaluru on August 31, 2012.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/timeout-bengaluru-bangalore-beat-bangalores-new-champions-for-culture

IT, The City and Public Space

nishant — 2011-08-02T06:07:02Z

In the Introduction to the project, Pratyush Shankar at CEPT, Ahmedabad, lays out the theoretical and practice based frameworks that inform contemporary space-technology discourses in the fields of Architecture and Urban Design. The proposal articulates the concerns, the anxieties and the lack of space-technology debates in the country despite the overwhelming ways in which emergence of internet technologies has resulted in material and imagined practices of people in urbanised India. The project draws variously from disciplines of architecture, design, cultural studies and urban geography to start a dialogue about the new kinds of public spaces that inform the making of the IT City in India. You can also access his comic strip visual introduction to the project at http://www.isvsjournal.org/pratyush/internet/Dashboard.html

Introducion:

There has been, in the fields of design and architecture, a close link between the shape and imagination of the city spaces and the dominant technologies of the time. The study of space (Architecture, Public places and City form) can lead to very interesting insights into the expression of the society with respect to the dominant technologies. Manuels Castells argues that space is not a mere photo-copy (reflection) of the society but it is an important expression. Fredric Jameson, in his identification of the condition of post-modernity demonstrates how the transition into new technologies is perhaps first and most visibly reflected in the architecture, as physical spaces get materially reconstructed, not only to house the needs and peripheries of the emerging technologies but also to embody their aesthetics in their design and built form.Earlier technologies have led to new understandings of the notions of the public and commons. Jurgen Habermas argues, how the emergence of print cultures and technologies led to a structural transformation of the public sphere by creating new and novel forms of participation and political engagement for the print readers. Within cinema studies in India, Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Madhav Prasad have looked at the ‘cinematic city’ - how material conditions of the city transform to house the cinema technologies, and how the imagination of certain cities is affected by the cinematic representations of these spaces. Mike Davis’ formulations of an ‘Ecology of Fear’ and Sean Cubbit’s idea of ‘The Cinema Effect’ also show the integral relationship that technologies have with the imagination and materiality of urban spaces.

Research Area:

The rise of the Internet in India in last decade poses interesting questions concerning ways of studying city spaces and its architecture. The Internet evokes and represents space in more than one way. Communities that represent the present urban social processes often mediate this visual and textual reference to space on the Internet but it is also an unwitting expression of way people choose to imagine their city, its places and its built form. It is important and pertinent for example to understand how Internet communities choose to abstract their own city through various direct or indirect discourses. The following will be the key questions

· It will be interesting to observe how the idea of a city gets represented on the Internet through both intended and casual references. For example is the City seen as a finite clarified artifact (as many political leadership would like us to believe) or is it seen as complex set of relationships or systems of places.

· How does the city get represented through the Internet with reference to its regional physical context (both geographical and cultural landscape)? Such an enquiry can help us in knowing how representation of city through the Internet acknowledges, neglects or fails to read its relationship with the local fundamental conditions[i] (of topography, water and culture)

The actual morphological context of the city will then become an important precursor for such an enquiry. The structure and flows in the city have often been compared to the Internet itself in popular discourses. This assumption can be further analyzed through spatial study of the city as a node in large region and as many several nodes within the city itself. The idea of Spaces of Flow in metropolis cities and places as nodes serving the flow has been very well articulated by Manuel Castells at a generic level. The issue of place[ii] and its representation (through internet) can be another area that can offer us very interesting insights into the relationship between the Cartesian and imagined space. The evolution of a new graphic language on the Internet needs closer examination from both its use of spatial symbolism as well as its impact on urban space.

However the contextual issue of an Indian idea of space will becomes the important narration as a background to such studies. This inquiry needs examination from a more contextual point of view: from both geographical (nature of cities) and building typology perspectives (spatial and programmatic types)

The following questions will be investigated further

a. How do the current Internet technology, processes and language reflect in Architecture and urban spaces of cities?

b. Will the form of the City and its Architecture understood any differently now[iii]?

The relationship between the building skin and spatial typology of some recent architectural and urban design project can form an interesting narrative to understand these issues. Here the issue of urban and architectural lighting, signage and graphics can be examined more closely and hence a study of the building skins and typology. The other largely ignored area of study concerns the role of the Government of India with the Internet. When was the last time we visited the railway reservation center to get a ticket or stood in a queue for hours to be the first on the window? Many Indians still do, but for many an Internet based on-line tickets reservation site largely substitutes that experience of the place (railway reservation center), people and the early morning tea on the gate. This needs closer examination from point of view of understanding the transformation and gentrification of some of the most democratic public service spaces in India such as the Railway stations, Municipal offices and banks. Apart from the material practices of the people, it is interesting to see how the integration of technologies within various urban governance practices affect the way in which cities morph, develop and change.

Methodology:

The aim is to engage with the spatial context of Indian cities while teasing out issues of the cultural phenomenon associated with the Internet. The following will be the key methods used in research

· To identify and narrate the social structures and processes that engage both with the intangible (meanings, symbols, communication etc.) and the tangible (morphology, structure, geography) in select Indian cities. This elaboration will form an important theoretical premise specific to further understanding space in Indian Cities.

· To document stories of individuals and groups of the city that demonstrates the typical changes that are taking place in various social and economic processes as related to the Internet. The aim will be to address both the tangible and intangible aspects while narrating the stories

· To map the spatial implication (structure and nature of spaces) of the above mentioned changes on the city

· To derive a broader narrative while weaving through different stories, that attempts to address the issue of Internet, society and space in Indian Cities

The research can be largely narrated through documentation of such representative situations but will require a clear articulation of the theoretical premises at the onset.

A review literature chapter which specifically marks the different contours of city-technology relationship – from IT cities which are planned to house technologies, to SEZ’s which emerge as new forms of technologised cities, to the gradual transformation and restructuration of city spaces and publics would also be undertaken. Moreover it will combine the contextual based study of cities, their public place and Architecture along with studies of the discourses on the Internet. The project will look at different actors who play an active, but often invisible role in the transformation of these spaces.

Dissemination and Outputs:

The project shall bring forth a monograph (approximately 50,000 words) that looks at a relationship between internet technologies and the city with a historical perspective, in order to explore the notions of public, built form, city spaces etc. within the Indian context.

A journal paper that engages with the contemporary discourses in Architecture and produces a new theoretical formulation of the city-technology relationship.

Part of the research method could possibly include an elective course or workshop at CEPT University to tap on variety of narrations through different students to strengthen both the premise and contextual focus of the study.

[i] This is to say that city form and its perception is very much a result of the both the local geographical and cultural context

[ii] “Place” can be defined through both space and character of an area and where the human experience is important. We experience places and hence understand it as they hold different processes and meanings.

[iii] So does the presence of Internet in our lives impact the way we begin to understand the Architecture of our city?

Bibliography

Venturi, Robert. Learning from Las-Vegas : the forgotten symbolism of architectural form. MIT Press, 1976

Castell, Manuel. The Rise of the Networked Society. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000

Adorno Theoder. The Culture Industrty (Routledge Classics). Routledge, 2001

Benjamin Walter. The Arcade Project. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002

Jameson Fredric. Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capatalism. Verso, 1999

Davis Mike. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. Random House, 1998

Ashish Rajadhayaksha. Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (South Asian Cinemas).

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/Introduction