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http://editors.cis-india.org
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First Thing First
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/first-thing-first
<b>Studies often focus on how digital natives do their activism in identifying the characteristics of youth digital activism and dedicate little attention to what the activism is about. The second blog post in the Beyond the Digital series reverses this trend and explores how the Blank Noise Project articulates the issue it addresses: street sexual harassment. </b>
<p></p>
<p>To
try to understand youth digital activism is to first understand what the issue
it deals with is all about. This point is made clear by the 13 people involved
in Blank Noise, who all started our conversation with a discussion on eve
teasing, the issue that Blank Noise deals with and the reason for its existence.
Taking the hint from them, I start sharing my research journey by sharing how
Blank Noise thinks of the issue it takes. As I recall our conversations, I am
still amazed by how everyone, regardless of whether they have been involved as
an initiator of a 15-day Facebook campaign or as a coordinator for five years,
share the following articulation </p>
<p>‘Eve
teasing’ is a euphemism in English that refers to the various forms of sexual
harassment experienced by women in public places, be it parks, streets, or
buses. It takes different forms, ranging from staring, verbal lampooning,
accidental jostling, or outright groping. While public sexual harassments also
occur in almost every place in the globe, the term ‘eve teasing’ itself is
particular to South Asia, especially India. The term plays on the biblical Eve
that is considered as a temptress, playing on the dichotomy of ‘good and bad’
women and placing the blame on women for enticing men to tease them. The word
‘tease’ itself downplays the severity of the action and making it a trivial,
funny, non-issue - so much that it is regarded as a rite of passage into
womanhood and ignored by the authorities unless it leads to violent deaths. This
term is what Blank Noise seeks to address; it aims to denounce the word ‘eve
teasing’ and call it by its appropriate name: street sexual harassment.</p>
<p>While
in the popular perception street sexual harassment happen only to young women
who dress in Western fashion, actually all women irrespective of age, class, or
dress have experienced it. In a much lesser degree, men also experienced street
sexual harassment. However, the norms of masculinity deny their victimhood and
a typical reaction would be ‘yes, I got felt up but I pity the bugger because
he’s gay’ (Blank Noise, 2005).</p>
<p>The
root of the problem is how eve teasing is internalized by all members of the
society, including women. Laura Neuhaus, a 27 year old American woman who
became active in Blank Noise when she worked in Bangalore for a few years, was
shocked to find that the senior women in her department, who had PhD degrees
and were at the top of their career, turned a blind eye to the harassment they
experience and advised her to do the same. Tanvee Nabar, a 19 year old student
who was one of the initiators of Blank Noise’s ‘I Never Ask for It’ Facebook
campaign, stated that victims may also perpetuate the problem by thinking that
accusing themselves of being responsible for the harassment because of the way
they dress or behave. She said, “Even by thinking that way I am validating eve
teasing, so this needs to stop.”<em> </em></p>
<p>The
problem thrives on the silence of victims, who are further deterred from
speaking up by negative reactions ranging from agreeing that it’s a problem but
it should be ignored because nothing can be done about it, increased
restrictions from protective parents, or even offers to beat up the perpetrator
to get even by men relatives or spouses.</p>
<p>However,
Blank Noise recognizes that the issue is not as straightforward as it may seem.
While some actions like groping are clearly a form of harassment, other forms
such as looking or verbal taunting are not as obvious. Therefore, rather than
offering a rigid guideline to what is or is not street sexual harassment, Blank
Noise attempts to build a definition of ‘eve teasing’ through public polls,
both online on its blog and on the streets.</p>
<p>Blank
Noise does not advocate for any specific, tangible solution either. It is not proposing for a new legislation or service
provision. Many youth experts would say that it is a sign of youth’s decreasing
trust to the state, but actually this is an extension of Blank Noise’s
acknowledgement of the ambiguity of street sexual harassment. Hemangini Gupta, a
29 years old Blank Noise coordinator, asked, “Should we be allowing the state to legislate an issue like street
sexual harassment where there is so much grey even with how it is understood
and defined - from ‘looking’ to physical violence?” Instead, Blank Noise aims
at creating public dialogue to break the ignorance on street sexual harassment and change the
mindset of both men and women, young and old. Blank Noise does not promote a specific course of action for women
affected by the harassment either; it promotes the confidence to choose how to
react to harassment.</p>
<p>What
is unique about Blank Noise from this articulation? Some would argue that Blank
Noise is unique for being the first collective that addresses eve teasing, but
a closer inquiry into the history of the Indian women movements show that it is
widely acknowledged as a form of violence against women. However, perhaps due
to the limited resources of the movement, efforts to address eve teasing have
been taken up very systematically (Gandhi and Shah, 2002). In this sense, when
it was born in 2003, Blank Noise was unique for being the only group whose
existence is solely dedicated to address this issue.</p>
<p>Blank
Noise is not unique in problematizing the issue of violence against women. The
women’s movements in India and elsewhere have been refusing to prescribe any
solutions to the victims and identifying patriarchal mindset of both men and
women as the root cause either. Yet, it is exceptional in not identifying an
opponent or an entity where concrete demands are proposed to push for a
tangible progress towards a change of mindset.</p>
<p>Intangible
changes are as good as tangible ones. This might be a new characteristic of how
digital natives think about their causes, but it could also be more related to
their reading of the specific issue they are dealing with. Perhaps, if the
issue at hand is climate change, the same people will advocate for specific
solutions to the state or promote concrete behavior change. Either way, the
message is clear: we need to always take into account <em>what </em>a digital natives activism is about and not just <em>how </em>they do it!</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p><em>This is the second post in the <strong><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/the-beyond-the-digital-directory" class="external-link">Beyond the Digital</a> </strong>series, a research
project that aims to explore new insights to understand youth digital activism
conducted by Maesy Angelina with The Blank Noise Project under the Hivos-CIS
Digital Natives Knowledge Programme. <br /></em></p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p><em><u>Reference:</u></em><u></u></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Blank Noise
(2005) ‘Frequently Asked Questions’. Accessed 21 September 2010. <a href="http://blog.blanknoise.org/2005/03/frequently-asked-questions.html">http://blog.blanknoise.org/2005/03/frequently-asked-questions.html</a></p>
<p><u><br /></u></p>
<p>Gandhi, N. and
Shah, N. (1992) <em>The Issues at Stake:
Theory and Practice in the Contemporary Women’s Movement in India. </em>New
Delhi: Kali for Women</p>
<p>Source for the picture: <a href="http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/group.php?gid=2703755288">http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/group.php?gid=2703755288</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/first-thing-first'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/first-thing-first</a>
</p>
No publishermaesyCyberspaceDigital ActivismEve teasingDigital NativesStreet sexual harassmentYouthBeyond the Digitalmovements2011-08-04T10:31:48ZBlog EntryThe power of the next click...
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/chatroulette
<b>P2P cameras and microphones hooked up to form a network of people who don't know each other, and probably don't care; a series of people in different states of undress, peering at the each other, hands poised on the 'Next' button to search for something more. Chatroulette, the next big fad on the internet, is here in a grand way, making vouyers out of us all. This post examines the aesthetics, politics and potentials of this wonderful platform beyond the surface hype of penises and pornography that surrounds this platform.</b>
<p></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In his
futuristic novel <em>1984</em>,
George Orwell conceived of a Big Brother who watches us all the time, tracking
every move we make, every step we take, and reminding us that we are being
watched. The Internet has often been seen as the embodiment of this fiction.
There are many who unplug computers, look over surreptitious shoulders and wear
tin-foil hats so that their movements cannot be traced. While this caricatured
picture might seem absurd to funny, there is no denying the fact that we are
being stalked by technologies. As our world gets more connected and our
dependence on digital and internet objects grow, we are giving out more and
more of our private and personal information for an easy trade-off with
convenience and practicality.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">As a reply to
the question “Who watches the watchman?” several Internet theorists had
suggested as a reply, a model where everybody looking at everybody else so that
there is no one person who has exclusive powers of seeing without being seen.
In this utopian state, people would be looking at each other (thus keeping a
check on actions), looking after each other (forming virtual care networks) and
looking for each other (building social networks with familiar strangers).
After about 20 years of the first emergence of this discussion vis-à-vis the
World Wide Web , comes an internet platform that produces a strange universe of
people looking at.for.after each other in a condition of extreme vouyerism,
performance, exhibitionism, surveillance and playfulness. It is a website that
the Digital Natives are flocking to because it changes the way they look at
each other. Literally.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Chatroulette! is
a new MMORPG (Massively Multiple Online
Role Playing Game) that uses a Peer-2-Peer network to constantly pair random
people using their web cams, to look at each other. You start a Game and you
begin a series of ‘lookings’ as people look back at you. Connect, cruise,
watch, interact, boot – that is the anatomy of a Chatroullete! game. If you
like what you see, you can linger a while or begin a conversation, or just
‘boot’ your ‘partner’ and get connected to somebody else in the almost infinite
network. In the process you come across the unexpected, unpredictable and the
uncanny. In the last one month of betting my time on Chatroullete!, I have seen
it all and then some more – masturbating teenagers, strip teasing men and
women, animals (including a very handsome tortoise) staring back at me, groups
of friends eating dehydrated noodles and giggling, partners in sexual
intercourse, graphic images of human gentilia, clever advertisements, pictures,
art, musicians performing, dancers dancing, conference delegates staring
bemusedly at a screen, ... the list is endless and probably exhausting. A growing community of
users now dwell on Chatroulette! to connect in this new way that is part speed
dating, part networking, part performance, part voyeurism.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The verdict on
the blogosphere is still not in whether this is a new fad or something more
long-lasting. Irrespective of its
longevity, what Chatroullete! has done is show us a new universe of social
interaction that Digital Natives around the world find appealing. The possibilities of cultural exchange,
collaborative working, love, longing and learning that emerge around
Chatroullete! are astounding. For Digital Natives the appeal of
Chatroullete! is in forging viral and temporary networks which defy the
Facebook way of creating sustained communities of interaction. This is the
defining moment of virtual interaction and online networking –A model that is
no longer trying to simulate ‘Real Life’ conditions online by forming permanent
networks of ‘people like us’. Chatroulette!
marks the beginning of a new way of spreading the message to completely random
strangers, enticing them into thought, exchange and mobilisation through the
world of gaming. The potentials for drawing in thousands of unexpected people
into your own political cause are astounding. It might be all cute cats and
sexual performance now, but it is only a matter of time when Digital Natives
start exploring the possibility of using Chatroulette! to mobilise resources
for dealing with crises in their personal and public environments. The wheel
has been spun. We now wait to see where the ball lands.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/chatroulette'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/chatroulette</a>
</p>
No publishernishantCyberspaceDigital ActivismGamingDigital NativesCybercultures2012-03-13T10:43:41ZBlog EntryColour Me Political
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dn2
<b>What are the tools that Digital Natives use to mobilise groups towards a particular cause? How do they engage with crises in their immediate environments? Are they using their popular social networking sites and web 2.0 applications for merely entertainment? Or are these tools actually helping them to re-articulate the realm of the political? Nishant Shah looks at the recent Facebook Colour Meme to see how new forms of political participation and engagement are being initiated by young people across the world.</b>
<p></p>
<p>On Facebook, now acclaimed as one of the most popular social
networking sites in the world, the one thing that almost all the users engage
is, in updating their status updates. These updates can be varied – capturing
personal moods and emotions, reporting on things that strike one in the course
of a normal day, offering political opinions, suggesting movies and books to
friends, and often making public announcements of important events in life. The
updates appear as a live feed, updates in almost-real time, letting people in
networks connect, know, discuss and share information about their personal
lives. Often, to outsiders, these updates would appear pointless; I remember
somebody asking me, “But why would I want to know what you had for breakfast?”
Many status updates indeed border on the everyday and ordinary, of no interest
to anybody but the immediate networks.</p>
<p>However, in the first half of January in 2010, Facebook
users across the world started observing a strange pattern. Many people in
their networks were making one word status updates with the name of a colour.
Just that. A colour. Facebook users woke up to find “Green!”, “Red!”, “White!” “Black!”
in their live feed. No explanations and a cryptic silence. It was a viral
phenomenon, with the colours appearing across the board, in different parts of
the world, spanning all languages, cultures, and contexts. Also, it was
observed, almost all of the users putting this update, were women. It created a
lot of discussion, speculation, curiosity and conspiracy theories. Blog posts
discussing this phenomenon started appearing. People were twitting about it.
There was an element of surprise, and perhaps of frustration, because the
people making those colour updates were refusing to offer any explanations.</p>
<p>Eventually, after a few internet years (about 3 days, I
think!) the word got out. It was a meme. A meme is an internet gene (because it
replicates) which spreads virally, through different social communication and
networking sites. It invites people to participate in a series of actions,
either to answer a question or perform a certain act, and pass it along. The
colour updates were a part of the meme which was doing the rounds on the
internet:</p>
<p> "Some fun is
going on.... just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color,
nothing else. And send this on to ONLY girls, no men .... It will be neat to
see if this will spread the wings of cancer awareness. It will be fun to see
how long it takes before the men will wonder why all the girls have a color in
their status."</p>
<p>
What the message managed to do was take an
important cause and through fun, and play, and a little bit of excitement, got
young women around the world to ponder on the possibility, cure and prevention
of breast cancer. What was just a personal update capturing space suddenly
became a place of political mobilisation and participation. Both, men and
women, reading those colours, took a moment to think about breast cancer and
spread the word among their friends. Discussions, which started with curiosity,
ended with a sombre note. While there are speculative theories about how some
women in Detroit started this particular meme, there is no credible source of
information.</p>
<p> What is particularly of interest, is how, without any apparent
funding, or organisation, or the infrastructure that generally accompanies such
behemoth projects, this viral meme captured more attention and had more people
participating than most campaigns started by traditional activists or
governments. What Facebook, and other spaces like it offer, is the
infrastructure and the potential for such massive movements. As the Digital
Natives grow up with new technologies, they change the landscape of political
and social transformation. And the cryptic colour updates is telling us the
story of how things will change in the future.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dn2'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dn2</a>
</p>
No publishernishantCyberspaceDigital ActivismDigital NativesYouthSocial Networking2011-08-04T10:34:27ZBlog EntryMeet the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dn1
<b>Digital Natives live their lives differently. But sometimes, they also die their lives differently! What happens when we die online? Can the digital avatar die? What is digital life? The Web 2.0 Suicide machine that has now popularly been called the 'anti-social-networking' application brings some of these questions to the fore. As a part of the Hivos-CIS "Digital Natives with a Cause?" research programme, Nishant Shah writes about how Life on the Screen is much more than just a series of games. </b>
<p>
In the new year, 2010, one of the most startling stories was of mass
suicides. About 50,000 people were affected. Legal cases were filed. The
interwebz were abuzz with the tale of how they did it. There was talk
about a website that was responsible for this. The blogosphere went into
a frenzy discussing the ‘new lease of life’ that these suicides
provided. Videos of people caught in the act found their way onto
popular video distributing spaces. And for everybody who talked about
it, it was partly a joke and partly a gimmick. However, for a
significant population, across the globe, the news came as a shock and a
moment of self-reflection.</p>
<p>
Meet the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. It is a simple online machine which
helps people commit digital suicide by destroying their digital
identities on popular social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter,
LinkedIn and Myspace. It is software that deletes every single
transaction which you may have ever performed in your digital avatar.
Messages sent to and received from friends, stored notes, results of
viral quizzes, pictures of the last party that you attended, status
messages describing state of mind, high scores and social assets on
social networking games, links shared, videos uploaded – everything gets
deleted, allowing you one last chance to re-live your digital life
before it locks you out of the 2.0 web for once and for all. To many
this might sound funny, but for the people, whose lives are lived,
stored, shared and experienced in the online spaces that Web 2.0 has
developed.</p>
<p>
We find them in universities and colleges, multitasking, preparing a
classroom presentation while chatting with friends and keeping track of
their online gaming avatars. We encounter them in offices, glued with
equal passion, to dating or social networking sites, and moderating geek
mailing lists. We chance upon them in homes and bedrooms, sharing the
most private and intimate details of their lives using live cam feeds
and audio/video podcasts. If these images are familiar to you, you have
encountered a digital native. It might have, recently, been a ‘child’
who knows how to use the mobile phone more effectively than you do, or a
teenager who can connect your machine online while thumb typing on the
cell phone, in a language which is not very familiar to you. It could
also be the saucy colleague in office, who is always on the information
highway, making jazzy presentations and animations or playing games with
their virtual avatars, or the taxi driver who has learned the power of
GPS maps or even the <em>chaiwallah</em> around the corner who uses his
mobile phone to download new music and conduct a romantic affair.</p>
<p>
These techno-mutants are slowly, but surely taking over the world. By
the end of 2010, the global youth population will be about 1.2. Billion
and 85 per cent of it will be in the developing countries of the world,
growing up with digital and Internet technologies as an integral part of
their life. They might not be a significant number now, but they are
going to be the citizens of the future, taking important decisions about
the destinies of nations and states, creating businesses and running
economies, educating young learners and shaping public opinions. And
they are learning the fundamentals of these actions in their online
interactions on Web 2.0 spaces using digital tools to morph, mobilise,
mutate, and manage their social, cultural and political lives and
identities. It is of these people that this column writes of – people
who are marked by digital and Internet technologies in strange and
unprecedented ways.</p>
<p>Originally published at http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause/News as a part of the Knowledge Programme: "Digital Natives with a Cause?"</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dn1'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dn1</a>
</p>
No publishernishantCyberspaceDigital NativesAgencyCyborgsCybercultures2011-08-04T10:34:22ZBlog EntryIT, The City and Public Space
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/Introduction
<b>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</b>
<p></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Introducion:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em>Research Area: </em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">·
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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">·
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<a name="_ednref1" href="#_edn1"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[i]</span></span></a> (of topography, water and
culture)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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<a name="_ednref2" href="#_edn2"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[ii]</span></span></a> 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoCommentText">The
following questions will be investigated further</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoCommentText">a.
How do the current Internet technology, processes
and language reflect in Architecture and urban spaces of cities?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoCommentText">b.
Will the form of the City and its Architecture understood
any differently now<a name="_ednref3" href="#_edn3"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[iii]</span></span></a>?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em>Methodology: </em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoCommentText">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</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoCommentText">·
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. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoCommentText">·
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</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoCommentText">·
To map the spatial implication (structure and
nature of spaces) of the above mentioned changes on the city</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoCommentText">·
To derive a broader narrative while weaving
through different stories, that attempts to address the issue of Internet,
society and space in Indian Cities</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em>Dissemination and Outputs:</em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">A journal paper that engages with the contemporary discourses in
Architecture and produces a new theoretical formulation of the city-technology
relationship.</p>
<p>
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.
<br /></p>
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<p>
</p>
<div id="edn1">
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn1" href="#_ednref1"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[i]</span></span></a>
This is to say that city form and its perception is very much a result of the
both the local geographical and cultural context</p>
</div>
<div id="edn2">
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn2" href="#_ednref2"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[ii]</span></span></a>
“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.</p>
</div>
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn3" href="#_ednref3"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[iii]</span></span></a> So
does the presence of Internet in our lives impact the way we begin to
understand the Architecture of our city?</p>
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"> </p>
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"><strong>Bibliography</strong></p>
<p class="MsoEndnoteText">Venturi, Robert. <em>Learning from Las-Vegas : the forgotten symbolism of architectural
form. </em>MIT Press, 1976</p>
<p>Castell, Manuel. <em>The Rise of the Networked
Society. </em>Oxford:<em> </em>Blackwell Publishers, 2000</p>
<p>Adorno Theoder. <em>The Culture Industrty (Routledge Classics). </em>Routledge, 2001</p>
<p>Benjamin Walter. <em>The Arcade Project.</em> Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002</p>
<p>Jameson Fredric. <em>Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capatalism.</em> Verso, 1999</p>
<p><span class="visualHighlight"></span> Davis Mike. <em>Ecology
of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster</em>. Random House, 1998</p>
<p>Ashish Rajadhayaksha. <em>Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency
(South Asian Cinemas). </em></p>
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"> </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/Introduction'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/Introduction</a>
</p>
No publishernishantCyberspaceCityCyberculturesArchitectureCommunities2011-08-02T06:07:02ZBlog EntryInquilab 2.0? Reflections on Online Activism in India*
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/revolution-2.0/digiactivprop
<b>Research and activism on the Internet in India remain fledgling in spite the media hype, says Anja Kovacs in her blog post that charts online activism in India as it has emerged. </b>
<p>Since the late 1990s when protesters against the WTO in Seattle used a variety of new technologies to revolutionize their ways of protesting so as to further their old goals in the information age, much has been made of the possibilities that new technologies seem to offer social movements. The emergence of Web 2.0 seems to have only multiplied the possibilities of building on the Internet's democratising potentials, so widely heralded since the rise of the commercial Internet in the 1990s, and since then, the use of social media for social change has received widespread media attention worldwide. From Spain to Mexico, activists used the Internet as a central tool in their efforts to organise and mobilise – be it to express their stand against a war in Iraq, against a Costa Rican Free Trade Agreement with the United States, to mobilise support for the Zapatistas of Chiapas, or more recently, to push for a change of guard in Iran.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>In 2009, when Nisha Susan launched the Pink Chaddi campaign, the 'ICT for Revolution' buzz finally seemed to have reached India as well. Phenomenally successful in terms of the attention it generated for the issue it sought to address, the campaign sought to protest in a humorous fashion against attacks on women pub-goers in Karnataka by Hindu right wing elements. In only a matter of weeks, Facebook associated with the campaign – 'The Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women', which gathered tens of thousands of members. It was ultimately killed off when Susan's Facebook account was cracked by rivals. The campaign was perhaps the singular most successful account of ‘digital activism’ in India so far, and an impressive one by all measures.</p>
<p>The creativity of the campaign should not come as a surprise to those familiar with the long and rich history of activism for social change in India. Organised social actors have been critical influences in the emergence of new social identities as well as on critical policy junctures from colonial times onwards, developing a fascinating and unmistakably Indian language of protest in the process (see Kumar 1997 and Zubaan 2006 for examples from feminist movement).</p>
<p> </p>
<p>As Raka Ray and Mary Faizod Katzenstein (2006) have pointed out, in the post-independence period, such organised activism for long was connected by at least verbal – if not actual – commitment to the common master frame of poverty alleviation and the ending of inequality and injustice, and this irrespective of the particular issues groups were working on. Since the late 1980s, however, a number of far-reaching changes have taken place in India. This period has been marked by the definite demise of secular democratic socialism as the dominant script of the Indian state and its simultaneous replacement by neo-liberalism. Moreover, in the same period, Hindu nationalism as an ideology too has gone from strength to strength, with only in the last five years a slowdown in its ascendancy. While for many traditional social movements of the Left the commitment to social justice remains, in this context a space has undeniably been created for groups with a very different agenda. The considerable popularity of organisations such as Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, both Hindu nationalist organisations, are prime indications of these transformations. However, the fragmentation of the activist space did not only benefit reactionary elements of society. The final emergence into visibility of a well-articulated middle class queer politics, for example, too, may well in many ways have been facilitated by the evolutions of the past 20 years. Although this point has been mostly elaborated in the context of the US (Hennessey 2000), in India, too, this seems to ring true at least in some senses.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The general shape-shifting of activism in India since the 1990s is not the only contextual factor that deserves obvious consideration in a study like this. In addition, since independence a close link has been forged in policy and people's imagination alike between science and technology on the one hand and development paradigms in India on the other. Not everyone agrees on the benefits of this association: all too frequently, the struggles of grassroots social movements are directed precisely against the outcomes or consequences of a supposedly 'scientifically' inspired development policy. The neo-liberal era is no exception to this: as Carol Upadhya (2004) has shown quite convincingly, the economic reform policies that are at the heart of neo-liberalism have been inspired first and foremost by the information technology sector in India, which has also in turn been their first beneficiary. And today as earlier, Asha Achuthan (2009) has pointed out, in the resistance to these policies, the subaltern who is the agent of grassroots social movements is frequently associated with a pre-technological purity that needs to be maintained in order to resist discourses and material consequences of technological change themselves. In popular discourses, at least, attitudes towards technology inevitably come in a binary mode.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Seeing the context in which digital activism in India has emerged, a number of pressing questions regarding the new forms that even progressive activism takes as it adopts new tools and methods, then, immediately offer themselves. Leaving aside the activities of right wing groups in India, who are the actors that occupy this space for activism and what are their relationship with offline activists groups? Which are the issues online activism seeks to address, and what are its master narratives, goals and audiences? Where does it locate problems in today's society, and what kind of solutions does it propose? How does it posit its relation to the global/international and to the offline-local; to dominant understandings of science and technology, development, or desirable social change? How are these understandings reflected in online activism, including in the choice and use of technologies but also in the discourses that are deployed and the audiences that are targeted? What are its methods, its strategies, its ways of organising? What role is played by organisations, collectives, networks, individuals? In what ways is the field marked by the conjuncture at which it emerged? Do those who first occupy (most of) it also set the parameters? Or do its tools fashion online activism's very conditions of existence?</p>
<p>The value of greater insight into these issues is not immediately apparent to all. For one thing, some would argue that, as connectivity in the emerging IT superpower remains limited, the importance of these questions to those concerned with social justice in India is really marginal. It is true that while commercial Internet services have been available in the country since 1995, for long the number of connections remained abysmally low. Even today, the number of subscriptions has only just crossed the 14 million mark, and barely half of these are broadband subscriptions, severely limiting the usefulness of a wide range of potential online activism tools (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India 2009 – figures are for the second quarter of 2009). According to I-Cube 2008 report (IMRB and Internet and Mobile Association of India 2008), there were an estimated 57 million claimed urban Internet users in the country in September 2008 and an estimated 42 million active urban Internet users. Corresponding figures for Internet users in rural areas in March 2008 were 5.5 million and 3.3 million respectively. Almost 88 million Indians were believed to be computer-literate at the time. Clearly, then, online activists are a tiny section of an already fairly small, privileged group, and at least in a direct sense, the availability of new tools is thus indeed unlikely to affect all activists or activism in the country.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Some of my own starting points while embarking on this study may seem to further give fuel to arguments against the value of this research. The idea of investigating online activism in India as it emerges followed from my observation – and a troubling one at that for me – that so far, and despite all the hype internationally, more traditional grassroots movements in India seem to have been slow to embrace the Internet as an integral part of their awareness raising and mobilisation strategies. Although they may attract the largest numbers of activists offline, the many so-called 'new' social movements that have emerged since the 1970s and that remain important actors pushing for social change seem most conspicuous by their relative absence online. This is especially true of those critical of current development paradigms and practices: movements fighting against dams, special economic zones or land acquisitions for “development” purposes seem visible only in relatively fragmented and generally marginal ways. Instead, middle-class actors addressing middle class audiences on middle class issues seem to be the flag bearers of Internet activism in India – the Pink Chaddi campaign or VoteReport India, a “collaborative citizen-driven election monitoring platform for the 2009 Indian general elections” (see votereport.in/blog/about) perhaps among the most well-known illustrations of this argument.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Both points are valid, and yet, while inquilab it may not be, to conclude from this that the study of online activism automatically is of only very limited value would be short-sighted. Indeed, even if the hypothesis that Internet activism is dominated by middle class actors who address middle class concerns is validated (note that in any case considerable segments of the leadership and cadre of grassroots movements, too, tend to come from middle class backgrounds), this is likely to affect all those interested in affecting social change, even if perhaps in varying degrees. For one thing, it would mean that as the public sphere is reshaped, important new quarters of its landscape are inhabited only be the elite, contradicting the still widely popular and even cherished belief (at least among those who are familiar with the Internet) that the Internet is a democratising force. Instead, the proportional visibility in the public sphere of dissenting viewpoints on development, science, neo-liberalism, progress, the state will only decrease. In addition, then, it may also indicate a further refracting of the activism landscape and its master narratives and methods, where different segments of activists increasingly need to vie with each other for recognition and validation of their respective understandings of political processes and of appropriate forms of engaging with these. As such battles intensify it is not too risky to make a prognosis on who will be the main losers. If, in an era in which the old activist master narrative of justice for all remains under strident attack, civil society has come to occupy at the expense of political society (a useful distinction first made by Parth Chatterjee in Chatterjee 2004) a whole arena of activism, this would indeed need to be a cause of concern for all. In order to gauge its ramifications, it is however, crucial to first of all understand in which ways and to what extent this statement rings true.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The current study may well not be able to fully develop all the above and other theoretical strands as they emerge in the course of this research. But what it does promise to do is to outline the breaks and continuities that mark the make-up, strategies, audiences and goals of those who embrace the new possibilities that the Internet provides at the same time as the information age so fundamentally reconstitutes our society. As a starting point for the analysis, this research will therefore, attempt to map the online activism that has taken place in India so far, focusing more specifically on the forms of activism that leave a public record on the Internet (a more extensive debate of various definitional issues is in order – I will take this up in a separate blog post, to follow later, however). At the core of the research will be the construction of a database pertaining to online activism in India with links to email lists, blogs, Facebook groups, popular hash tags and the like. Although much of the activism I will be looking at will be centred around what has come to be known as 'social media', my focus is thus broader than that, as older tools such as e-petitions, discussion boards and list servs, too, will be included in this study. The aim is to be as comprehensive as possible, although for the database to ever be complete will, of course, be an impossibility. Moreover, since only data available in the English language will be collected, the database will automatically have its limitations. The database will be further complemented by interviews with activists who have been involved in key online campaigns and, where appropriate, case studies. It is the data thus gathered that will form the basis of our analysis.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>While the scope of the study is thus admittedly ambitious, the fact that online activism in India is a fairly recent affair – little happened before 2002, and it has only really taken off in the past three years or so – makes this venture not an impossible one. The contribution I hope to make through this research is not simply to work on the Indian context, however. Despite the media hype surrounding the possibilities of the Internet for social change, research on the Internet and activism more generally remains limited so far. The paucity is perhaps particularly acute where activism and social media are concerned (Postill 2009). Moreover, the work that does exist, I argue, tends to look mostly at activists' use of one particular tool, for example YouTube, or Facebook. Sight is thus generally lost of the larger cyberecology of communication in which this use must be located, preventing an opportunity for genuine insight into the ways in which activism is reconfigured from materialising. By using a much wider lens, this research hopes to make a beginning to correcting this lacuna. It is in this way that the importance of the changes that are underway in the Indian activist landscape as elsewhere can be appropriately assessed.</p>
<p> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"><em><strong>*
Inquilab means revolution</strong></em></p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"><strong>References</strong></p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Achuthan, Asha (2009).
Re-Wiring Bodies. Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.
<a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/rewiring/review">http://www.cis-india.org/research/cis-raw/histories/rewiring/review</a>,
last accessed on 15 January 2010.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Chatterjee, Partha
(2004). <em>The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular
Politics in Most of the World</em>. Delhi: Permanent Black.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Hennessy, Rosemary
(2000). <em>Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism</em>.
London: Routledge.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">IMRB and Internet and
Mobile Association of India (2008). I-Cube 2008: Facilitating Citins,
Altins, Fortins (Faster, Higher, Stronger) Internet in India. IMRB
and Internet and Mobile Association of India, Mumbai. <a href="http://www.iamai.in/">www.iamai.in/</a>,
last accessed on 15 January 2010.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Kumar, Radha (1997). <em>The
History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women's
Rights and Feminism in India 1800-1990</em>. New Delhi: Zubaan.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Postill, John (2009).
Thoughts on Anthropology and Social Media Activism.
<em>Media/Anthropology</em>,
<a href="http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/thoughts-on-anthropology-and-social-media-activism/">http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/thoughts-on-anthropology-and-social-media-activism/</a><a href="http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/thoughts-on-anthropology-and-social-media-activism/">,
</a>last accessed on 15 January 2010.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Ray, Raka and Mary
Fainsod Katzenstein (2006). Introduction: In the Beginning, There Was
the Nehruvian State. In Raka Ray and Mary Fainsod Katzenstein
(eds.). <em>Social Movements in India: Poverty, Power, and Politics.</em>
New Delhi: Oxford University Press.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Telecom Regulatory
Authority of India (2009). The Indian Telecom Services Performance
Indicators, April-June 2009. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India,
New Delhi. <a href="http://www.trai.gov.in/">www.trai.gov.in</a><a href="http://www.trai.gov.in/">,
</a>last accessed on 15 January 2010.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Upadhya, Carol (2004). A
New Transnational Capitalist Class: Capital Flows, Business Networks
and Entrepreneurs in the Indian Software Industry. <em>Economic and
Political Weekly</em>, 39(48): 5141-5151.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Zubaan (2006). <em>Poster
Women: A Visual History of the Women's Movement in India</em>. New
Delhi: Zubaan.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/revolution-2.0/digiactivprop'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/revolution-2.0/digiactivprop</a>
</p>
No publishernishanthistories of internet in IndiaSocial mediaDigital ActivismCyberspaceAccess to Medicineinternet and societyResearchCybercultures2011-08-02T09:25:30ZBlog EntryChina's Generation Y : Youth and Technology in Shanghai
http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/GenerationY
<b>Within the context of internet technologies in China, Nishant Shah, drawing from his seven month research in Shanghai, looks at the first embodiment of these technologies in the urbanising city. In this post, he gives a brief overview of the public and academic discourse around youth-technology usage of China's Generation Y digital natives. He draws the techno-narratives of euphoria and despair to show how technology studies has reduced technology to tools and usage and hence even the proponents of internet technologies, often do a disservice to the technology itself. He poses questions about the politics, mechanics and aesthetics of technology and offers the premise upon which structures of reading resistance can be built. The post ends with a preview of the three stories that are to appear next in the series, to see how youth engagement and cultural production can be read as having the potentials for social transformation and political participation for the Digital Natives in China.</b>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/GenerationY'>http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/GenerationY</a>
</p>
No publishernishantCyberspaceSocial mediaShanghaiCyborgsCyberculturesDigital Natives2009-09-21T14:09:16ZBlog EntryIT and the cITy
http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/itcity
<b>Nishant Shah tells ten stories of relationship between Internet Technologies and the City, drawing from his experiences of seven months in Shanghai. In this introduction to the city, he charts out first experiences of the physical spaces of Shanghai and how they reflect the IT ambitions and imaginations of the city. He takes us through the dizzying spaces of Shanghai to see how the architecture and the buildings of the city do not only house the ICT infrastructure but also embody it in their unfolding. In drawing the seductive nature of embodied technology in the physical experience of Shanghai, he also points out why certain questions about the rise of internet technologies and the reconfiguration of the Shanghai-Pudong area have never been asked. In this first post, he explains his methdologies that inform the framework which will produce the ten stories of technology and Shanghai, and how this new IT City, delivers its promise of invisibility.</b>
<p></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Shanghai. City of bits, bytes and
Baozi. China’s home-grown success story that eclipses the colonial legends of
HongKong. The city that was, until the Bejing Olympics, the showcase city which
is now working hard at recovering some of its stolen glory as it prepares for
the World Trade Expo in 2010. A city that is constantly at war with itself,
trying to museumise its past, eradicate pockets of history and times, and
running to escape its present and live in a futuristic tomorrow. A city that
broke the distinctions of the public and the private, by privatising all that
was public, and by encouraging the private to be constructed for a public
spectacle. There are many stories of Shanghai to be told, but the one that
needs to be told now, is about the space of the city and how, in its attempt to
become an IT city, it has become a city of surfaces, all reminding you, in an
overwhelming hypervisual way that is the predominant aesthetic of cyberspaces,
that it is the city that not only houses technology but also embodies it,
becoming, possibly, the only city in Asia that brings the IT back into the
City.</p>
<img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/shanghai/image_preview" alt="Aerial view" class="image-left" title="Aerial view" />
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">A cursory glance around you,
perhaps travelling in the uber efficient metro system that feeds into the
mobile metaphor of accelerated speed and space that Shanghai has become, or
just walking down the more touristy XinTianDi where the rich and the famous of
Shanghai’s society hang out, or walking down the HuaiHai Road where
sky-scrapers fortress the sky and shopping malls greet you with neon-lit spaces
of consumption, you are overwhelmed at the significant and ubiquitous presence
of internet technologies. The buildings are designed to be interfaces, rather
than walls, covered constantly with the graffiti of digital advertisements,
live weather and stock updates, displaying the latest block-buster movie, or
just presenting a kaleidoscopic array of lights spiralling in a dizzying,
schizophrenic style on the surfaces of the buildings. As you walk through the
sci-fi inspired urban landscape, you try and suppress the feeling of being
inside a giant-size arcade game, waiting for a gobbling monster to come and
devour you, and continue browsing at the city that never remains the same –
either the surfaces mutate so that not even signboards or billboards remain the
same, or the very buildings disappear into rubble under the shadows of gigantic
cranes, as a concentrated demand for real estate necessitates a constant
recycling of limited space (The estimate says that 60 per cent of Shanghai gets
rebuilt every ten years), or high speed transport dissolves the city into a
blur so that only the biggest and the brightest buildings stay as north-stars
to the fluid geography of the city.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">If you happen to stand on the
magnificent Bund in PuXi (The older Shanghai), you keep on looking down at the
ground beneath your feet, making sure that it is still there, because the
slightly lurid but dazzling sky-line that faces you, with huge LCD screens
mounted on buildings, lights flirting with low lying clouds on the top of
gigantic buildings, and a constant buzz of electricity breaking the waves in
the Huangpu river, you know that you are in a city that gives IT its address.
No other city in Asia – not even the almost-not-Asia spaces of Tokyo or
Singapore – gives you the assurance of being completely and totally immersed in
the glory of Internet technologies. Shanghai stands, networked, connected,
mobile, accelerated, and in a time-less vacuum that hoovers the future into the
present, as a city that technology studies will have to reckon with in a
paradigm of its own.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Bund/image_preview" alt="Shanghai Bund" class="image-right" title="Shanghai Bund" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">And so strong is this seduction
of technology that conversations about technology and its place in Shanghai,
always revolves around the surface – about the building of the surface, about
the dissolution of depth (temporal or spatial),
and about imagining the city only in terms of light, connectivity, and
speed. So that the historicity in PuXi
becomes a flat display of the Chinese Way (Zhongguo Fangshi) and the
work-in-progress present in PuDong remains a quest for the future. In this split discourse, the questions and concerns - about governance, about citizenship, about regulation, about cultural production and political negotiation - become invisible. Like the buildings, which get guised in digital cloaks, the questions that pressingly need to be asked but are always postponed, also get cloaked in the rhetoric of development propelled by ICTs and globalisation. In a city that was constructed to eternally deflect attention, ownership or voices, how does one begin to scratch at the surfaces (Literally and figuratively) to search for something more than narratives of consumption, solipsist self-gratification, and self-congratulatory development?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">It is with this agenda, in this city, torn and
marked and seamlessly stitched by technology, that I start to unravel my
questions about Internet and Society in China, trying to look at relationships
between technologies, city spaces and identities, drawing from seven months spent
at the Centre for Contemporary Studies at the Shanghai University. These stories, written with retrospective memory and embellished by the privilege of
hindsight, posit a set of questions about Internet technologies, construction
of city spaces, and manifestation of identities in China, but especially in
Shanghai, to locate potentials of social transformation, political
participation, engagement and discourse, which has not been transplanted on
technology studies in China. In the process it also lays down a framework to
understand how, in an oppressive or authoritarian regime, the cultural becomes
the grounds upon which foundations of new political intervention and social
change can be built.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This blog, in its ten different
entries, relies on academic and popular discourse, semi-structured interviews,
participant observation, field work, conversations, and personal experiences that
I collected in my stay there, trying to deal with the double translations of
culture and language. Whenever I have been unsure – and those moments have been
many – I have tried to discuss and debate ideas with colleagues, friends, peers
and participants, to ensure that the observations or arguments are qualified by
more than just a neo-colonial meaning making sensibilities. Despite that rigour, if faults remain, they
are all mine, and hopefully will serve as points of entry into a fruitful
discourse.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/itcity'>http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/itcity</a>
</p>
No publishernishantCyberspaceinternet and societyShanghaiICT4DDigital NativesCyberculturesDigital subjectivitiesIT Cities2009-09-18T10:45:27ZBlog 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: Impassioned Objects
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/impassioned-objects-unraveling-the-history-of-fetish
<b>In this post, a third in the series documenting her CIS-RAW project, Pleasure and Pornography, Namita Malhotra explores the idea of fetish as examined by Anne McClintock (i) . This detour is an exploration of the notion of fetish, its histories and meanings, and how it might relate to the story of Indian porn. </b>
<p><br />The etymology of fetish derives from the word fetico (Portuguese) which means sorcery or magic arts. In 1760, it was used to refer to primitive religions, especially in relation to the growing project of imperialism. In 1867, Marx coined the term commodity fetishism – using the implied meaning of primitive magic to express the central social form of modern industrial economy, whereby the social relation between people metamorphoses into the relation between things. It was only after this, in 1905, that Freud transferred the word, with all these meanings still clinging to it, to the realm of sexuality and perversions. As Anne McClintock points out, in her useful account and re-understanding of the fetish in the book <em>Imperial Leather</em> (ii), psychoanalysis, philosophy, and Marxism all take shape around the invention of the primitive fetish, which conveniently displaces what the modern mind cannot accommodate onto the invented domain of the primitive. She states that the not-so-concealed rationale of imperialism is fetishism. Fetishists (racial, sexual and other) became a mode of warranting and justifying conquest and control -- whether it was the policing of sexual fetishism for control of classes in Europe and colonies, or the invention of racial fetishism central to the regime of imposing sexual surveillance in the colonies.<strong> The imperial discourse on fetishism became a discipline of containment</strong> (iii) .</p>
<p>On the other hand in the realm of sexuality, fetish becomes a question of male sexuality alone -- male perversion par excellence. There are no female fetishists, either for Freud or Lacan, for to speak of female fetishism would involve displacing the basic precepts of psychoanalysis -- namely the scene of castration leading to phallic fetishism. However, McClintock points to the usefulness of studying female fetishism, as it allows for certain things to happen. First, it dislodges the centrality of the phallus in this discourse, which surprisingly makes way for the presence and legitimacy of a multiplicity of pleasures, needs, and contradictions that can’t be resolved or reduced merely to the desire to preserve the phallus. Very often, feminists such as McClintock read the Lacanian insistence on the centrality of the phallus as itself a fetishistic nostalgia for a single, male myth of origins and fetishistic disavowal of difference. Such a notion of fetish, embedded in phallic theory, gets easily reduced to sexual difference and does not allow/admit race or class as crucially formative categories as well; thus, race and class remain continuously of secondary status in the primarily sexually signifying chain.</p>
<p>“The racist fetishizing of white skin, black fetishizing gold chains, the fetishizing of black dominatraces, lesbians, cross dressing as men the fetishizing of national flags, slave fetishism, class cross-dressing, fetishes such as nipple clips and bras in male transvestism, leather bondage, PVC fetishism, babyism and so on -- these myriad different deployments of fetishistic ambiguity cannot be categorized under a single mark of desire, without great loss of theoretical subtlety and historical complexity.” Also McClintock points to racist, nationalistic and patriotic fetishes -- such as flags, crowns, maps, swastikas (or for instance chaddis) -- that can’t be simply rendered equivalent to the disavowal of male castration anxiety. <br /><br />McClintock calls for a renewed investigation of fetishism -- to open it up to a more complex and valuable history in which racial and class hierarchies would play as formative a role as sexuality. Rejecting the Lacanian and Freudian fixation on the phallus as central to psychoanalysis would call for a mutually transforming investigation into the disavowed relations of psychoanalysis and social history. In a way, it would be the bringing together of the varied ways in which fetish has been used -- by Freud (in the domain of psychoanalysis) in the realm of domesticity and the private, and by Marx (in the domain of male socio-economic history) in the realm of the market and possibly in the public. If these meanings were to speak to each other, what we discover is that fetish is in fact the historical enactment of ambiguity itself.</p>
<p>Fetishism involves the displacement onto an object of contradictions that the individual cannot resolve at a personal level. These contradictions could indeed be social, though lived with profound intensity in the imagination and flesh of the person. The fetish -- rather than being a merely an insignificant sexual or personal practice -- inhabits both personal and historical memory. It marks a crisis in social meaning -- the embodiment of an impossible resolution. This crisis/contradiction is displaced onto and embodied in the fetish object, which is thus destined to recur in compulsive ways. By displacing this power onto the fetish, then manipulating or controlling the fetish, the individual gains symbolic control over what might otherwise be terrifying ambiguities.</p>
<p>The fetish then can be called an impassioned object; something that emerges from a variety of social contradictions, rather than merely from the scene of castration or phallic centric domains. Hence they are neither universal, nor are they entirely about personal histories alone, but are about personal and historical memory or a social contradiction that is experienced at an intensely personal level. “As composite symbolic objects, fetishes thus embody the traumatic coincidence not only of individual but also of historical memories held in contradiction” (McClintock). This reading of fetishism gives rise to far richer possibilities of cultural analysis.</p>
<p>Fetish was neither proper to African or Christian European culture, but sprang into being from an abrupt encounter between two heterogeneous worlds during an era of mercantile capitalism and slavery. At this point it clearly embodies the problem of contradictory social value -- whether it is gold as valuable, or gold as warding off bad luck. Though initially just about heathen customs and rituals, it later also becomes a marking of certain groups of people for conquest. It is from this context that Freud transports the word, laden with meanings of conquest and violence, to the realm of sexuality. Obviously these meanings stain future connotations of fetish, the word fetish itself becoming prey to contradictory meanings of race and sex and difference.</p>
<p>For Freud, the fetish is the embodiment in one object of two positions -- castration and its denial. Though this does capture some sense of the ambiguity that McClintock also refers to, here the meanings oscillate between two, and only two, fixed options (a recurring male economy). The fetish becomes both a permanent memorial to the horror of castration, embodied not in the male but in the female -- as well as a token of triumph, and safeguard against the threat of castration. This has, of course, been critiqued by feminists quite severely. McClintock’s basic argument is that it is indeed hard, considering the varied nature of fetish objects, to find a single originary explanation in the psychic development of the individual -- in a single originary trauma. What is important here, however is to take on this notion of the fetish as an historical enactment of ambiguity itself, and see if as a theoretical concept it has any value to the study of the loose category of Indian porn, especially MMS porn. <br /><br /><strong>Soap in these strange days: fetish objects</strong><br /><br /><em>“Such spectacle creates the promise of a rich sight: not the sight of particular fetishized objects, but sight itself as richness, as the grounds for extensive experience.”<br />Dana Polan (iv)</em><br /><br />Anne McClintock’s work on fetish also looks at the seemingly ubiquitous object of soap as the carrier of many ambiguous meanings around gender, class, imperialism -- both the cult of domesticity (the running of the empire of home with servants, sweepers, cleaners, women, maids etc.) and the cult of new imperialism found in soap in its exemplary mediating form. The story of soap, for McClintock, reveals that fetishism rather than a quintessentially African propensity (belonging in the realm of lands and peoples that were being discovered through imperialism) was in fact central to industrial modernity; fetishism was not original either to industrial capitalism or precolonial economies, but was from the outset the embodiment and record of an incongruous and violent encounter (between two or more heterogenous cultures) and about rapid changes of modernity, rather than about the ‘primitive’. <br /><br />Marx says that the mystique of the commodity fetish lies not in its use value, but in its exchange value and its potency as a sign: “So far as (a commodity) is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it”. This could be linked to the idea of a mobile phone that is supposed to achieve so much beyond mere communication, at least according to the advertising -- they should mend ruptured relations and homes, get all the hot chicks, grow beautiful gardens, change the boring routine of life. For some time, the Samsung mobile phone ad with Estella Warren played in India, which probably moves the mobile phone with camera out of merely its symbolic use as enhancing attractiveness, to actually ‘getting’ or rather capturing girls by clicking. Magically in the ad, the act of clicking photographs make the girl not just willing, but she also takes the phone and photographs herself. Barring one scary moment when it looks like she might turn into an avenging warrior like Xena or The Bride, but instead she simpers into a loving sexy pose, she is willing. The ad can’t be easily dismissed as misogynistic, but it does give an intriguing glimpse of the intimate pictures and moments that can be captured with a mobile phone. <br /><br />That a mobile phone is fetishized as a commodity is probably evident, from the rush to get the more enhanced phone with the better camera and features, though mobile phones are also a ubiquitous element of one’s life, in some ways exactly like soap. Probably in a country like India, having a mobile phone can be read as opening up sexual possibilities in a way that wouldn’t be obvious in a more developed country. If the fetish is a social contradiction that is experienced at an intensely personal level, then the mobile phone, especially after the DPS MMS clip, is precariously located between the zones of the private and personal, and that which is entirely in the public domain beyond any control of the person(s). This ability of the mobile phone to occupy simultaneous universes because of its interconnectedness in a network, and that it is (for most people now) an entirely personal object with messages, numbers, conversations, images, videos, is what makes it unpredictable. <br /><br /><strong>Looking at MMS porn</strong><br /><em>“Memories were meant to fade. They were built that way for a reason”<br />Mace, Strange Days</em><br /><br />When looking at MMS porn, I’m irresistibly reminded of the movie <em>Strange Days</em>, in which Angela Basset’s character Mace expresses her frustration with Lenny (played by Ralph Fiennes). Lenny is obsessed with preserving memory and accessing other people’s experiences, through what in the movie are called playbacks. Playbacks are recordings of events in the brain that were fed back into brain waves to reproduce the earlier event -- the feelings, the sensations of touch, the smells and not just the visual. Playbacks haven’t been invented yet, but the obsessiveness with which Lenny wheels and deals (he’s also a dealer and collector of playbacks) gives a peculiar insight into how mobile phones are becoming fetish objects of sorts -- particularly MMSs recorded on mobile phones where other people are able to occupy the space of an unknown character that conveniently rarely ever appears on the screen. The famous pornographic ones are the DPS MMS clip and other MMS scandals, including the hidden voyeuristic ones taken without permission, and a precursor of this is Mysore Mallige where the man appears rarely on the screen and only at the end, almost like a signature. In a peculiar way MMS porn becomes like playback from Strange Days, a movie that is attempting to unravel the unknown future mired in technological changes that are messily intertwined with human desire and frailty. A future (set on the date of turning the millennium) that we’ve hopelessly gone past without even asking many of the questions that the characters in the movie pose.<br /><br />Indian websites advertise MMS scandals as a specific category of pornography. This category also includes genuine MMS clips of celebrities kissing (Kareena Kapoor), wardrobe malfunctions from Fashion Week, and also fake ones with celebrity look-alikes bathing, changing, having sex (Preity Zinta, Mallika Sherawat). Mostly what is being talked about are videos made on mobile phones by men, who record themselves having sex with ‘gullible’ women. The alleged gullibility of these women is probably essential to the erotic charge of such videos. They are shaky videos, especially when sex is underway, and have a grainy quality that makes them eerily real. Their perspective is usually that of the man who is holding the phone camera and rarely enters the frame himself, whereas the woman is definitely the desirable object that is being captured. Maybe this phenomenon can be understood better if one looks at McClintock’s idea of fetish and whether MMS/images on mobile phones can be located within that category -- whether the ambiguous nature of the video or image recorded on the mobile phone and its ability to be an intensely personal and private object and also to be so easily transmitted into networks signifies a crisis in social meanings around private and public. The mobile phone then merely becomes an object onto which this anxiety is displaced, and the recording of images repeatedly (and anxieties and fears triggered when they accidentally slip into the public domain) are ways of trying to control terrifying ambiguities over the private and the public (where aspects of sexuality, family and selfhood could be calamitously disrupted by a slip between the two categories). (v)<br /><br />In a strange way this is a parable for a larger phenomenon of pornographic circulation and the law, as well. The mass circulation of pornography is perceived as a private secret that is kept by all, and whenever there is slip between the two categories, the law and public discourse are barely able to deal with the furore of anxieties. And if not, then the law and public discourse proceed to deal with the banal unbuttoning of Akshay Kumar’s jeans by his wife as obscenity in courtrooms, as if we hadn’t all imagined an MMS that allowed us to be doing the same. <br /><br /> i. Anne Mcclintok’s work on sadomasochism illuminates some of the arguments that I make in relation to sexual subjectivity and the state’s interests and desires in policing it. (unpublished article for book on queer issues and the law). Her work borrows from notions developed by Foucault. “Sadomasochism plays social power backwards, visibly and outrageously staging hierarchy, difference and power, the irrational, ecstasy or alienation of the body, placing these ideas at the centre of western reason.” The analysis of sexual subjectivity and State’s interest in it also looks at the judgment on sadomasochism by the House of Lords, England that declares such activities that cause severe injuries and maim the body, as illegal, regardless of consent of parties. <br />ii. Anne Mcclintok, Imperial Leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest, Routledge, 1995.<br />iii. Ibid<br />iv. Cited from Laura Mulvey, Some Thoughts on Theories of Fetishism in the Context of Contemporary Culture, October, Vol. 65 (Summer, 1993), pp. 3-20. </p>
<p>v. As in the story of Chanda in Dev.d loosely inspired from the DPS MMS clip incident<br /><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/uploads/kalkichanda.jpg/image_preview" alt="Chanda from Dev.d" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Chanda from Dev.d" /><br /><br /><br /></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/impassioned-objects-unraveling-the-history-of-fetish'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/impassioned-objects-unraveling-the-history-of-fetish</a>
</p>
No publishernamitahistories of internet in IndiaCyberspaceinternet and societyObscenitywomen and internetYouTubeCyborgsCyberculturesDigital subjectivities2011-08-02T08:35:20ZBlog Entryi4D Interview: Social Networking and Internet Access
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/i4d-interview-social-networking-and-internet-access
<b>Nishant Shah, the Director for Research at CIS, was recently interviewed in i4D in a special section looking at Social Networking and Governance, as a lead up to the Internet Governance Forum in December, in the city of Hyderabad.</b>
<h3 align="left">Mechanism of Self-Governance Needed for Social Networks</h3>
<h3 align="left">Should social networking sites be governed, and if yes, in what way?<br /></h3>
<p align="justify"><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/uploads/nishantshah1.gif/image_preview" alt="Nishant Shah" class="image-left" title="Nishant Shah" />A
call for either monitoring or censoring Social Networking Sites has
long been proved ineffectual, with the users always finding new ways of
circumventing the bans or the blocks that are put into place. However,
given the ubiquitous nature of SNS and the varied age-groups and
interests that are represented there, governance, which is
non-intrusive and actually enables a better and more
effective experience of the site, is always welcome. The presumed
notion of governance is that it will set processes and procedures in
place which will eventually crystallise into laws or regulations.
However, there is also another form of governance - governance as
provided by a safe-keeper or a guardian, somebody who creates symbols
of caution and warns us about being cautious in certain areas. In the
physical world, we constantly face these symbols and signs which remind
us of the need to be aware and safe. Creation of a vocabulary of
warnings, signs and symbols that remind us of the dangers within SNS is
a form of governance that needs to be worked out. This can be a
participatory governance where each community develops its own concerns
and addresses them. What is needed is a way of making sure that these
signs are present and garner the attention of the user.</p>
<p align="justify"><strong>How do we address the concerns that some of the social networking spaces are not "child safe"?</strong> </p>
<p align="justify">The
question of child safety online has resulted in a raging debate. Several models, from the cybernanny to monitoring the child's
activities online ,have been suggested at different times and have
more or less failed. The concerns about what happens to a child online are
the same as those about what happens to a child in the physical world.
When the child goes off to school, or to the park to play, we train and
educate them about things that they should not be doing -- suggesting that they do not talk
to strangers, do not take sweets from strangers, do not tell people
where they live, don't wander off alone -- and hope that these will be
sufficient safeguards to their well being. As an added precaution, we
also sometimes supervise their activities and their media consumption. More than finding technical solutions for
safety online, it is a question of education and training and
some amount of supervision to ensure that the child is complying with
your idea of what is good for it. A call for sanitising the internet is more or less redundant, only, in fact,
adding to the dark glamour of the web and inciting younger users to go
and search for material which they would otherwise have ignored.</p>
<p align="justify"><strong>What are the issues, especially around identities and profile information privacy rights of users of social networking sites?</strong> </p>
<p align="justify">The
main set of issues, as I see it, around the question of identities, is
the mapping of the digital identities to the physical selves. The
questions would be : What constitutes the authentic self? What is the
responsibility of the digital persona? Are we looking at a post-human
world where online identities are equally a part of who we are and are sometimes even more a part of who we are than our physical selves? Does the older argument of the Original
and the Primary (characteristics of Representation aesthetics) still
work when we are talking about a world of 'perfect copies' and
'interminable networks of selves' (characteristics of Simulation)? How
do we create new models of verification, trust and networking within an SNS? Sites like Facebook and Orkut, with their ability to establish
looped relationships between the users, and with the notion of inheritance (¨friend of a friend of a friend of a friend¨), or even testimonials and
open 'walls' and 'scraps' for messaging, are already approaching these
new models of trust and friendship.</p>
<p align="justify"><strong>How do we strike a balance between the freedom of speech and the need to maintain law and order when it comes to monitoring social networking sites?</strong></p>
<p align="justify">I
am not sure if the 'freedom of speech and expression' and the
'maintaining of law and order' need to be posited as antithetical to each
other. Surely the whole idea of 'maintaining law and order' already
includes maintaining conditions within which freedom of speech and
expression can be practiced. Instead of monitoring social networking
sites to censor and chastise (as has happened in some of the recent
debates around Orkut, for example), it is a more fruitful exercise to
ensure that speech, as long as it is not directed offensively
towards an individual or a community, needs to be registered and heard.
Hate speech of any sort should not be tolerated but that is a fact
that is already covered by the judicial systems around the world. </p>
<p align="justify">What
perhaps, is needed online, is a mechanism of self-governance where the
community should be able to decide the kinds of actions and speech
which are valid and acceptable to them. People who enter into trollish
behaviour or hate speak, automatically get chastised and punished in
different ways by the community itself. To look at models of better
self-governance and community mobilisation might be more productive
than producing this schism between freedom of speech on the one hand
and the maintenance of law and order on the other.</p>
<p align="justify"><a class="external-link" href="http://www.i4donline.net/articles/current-article.asp?Title=netgov-Speak:-Lead-up-to-IGF-2008&articleid=2169&typ=Coulum">Link to original article on i4donline.net</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/i4d-interview-social-networking-and-internet-access'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/i4d-interview-social-networking-and-internet-access</a>
</p>
No publishernishantCyberspaceDigital NativesPublic AccountabilityCyberculturesCommunitiesDigital subjectivitiesDigital Pluralism2011-09-22T12:51:57ZBlog EntryCollaborative Projects Programme
http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/collaborative-projects-programme
<b></b>
<p>The Centre for Internet and Society recognises collaboration and
consultation as its primary mode of engaging with research and
intervention. The <strong>Collaborative Projects Programme (CPP)</strong> is CIS’
platform for partnering (intellectually, logistically, financially,
and administratively) with other organisations, individuals and
practitioners in projects which are of immediate concern to the work
that CIS is committed to.</p>
<p>The Collaborative Projects Programme also expands the scope of
research to produce a synergy between research and praxis. The
CPP is, in many ways, the in-house research that CIS undertakes, in
collaboration and consultation with other organisations, institutions
and individuals who have a stake and a say in the field of Internet
and Society. The CPP is not bound by any theme of programmatic
modalities and is envisioned more as a way for CIS to extend its
field and establish a strong network with other exciting spaces in
the Global South.</p>
<p>The Collaborative Projects Programme can include, but is not
limited to, organising of large conferences or workshops; developing
tools for better research and advocacy; data mining towards a
specific goal that complements CIS’ vision; producing original
monographs/publications/books targeted at different audiences;
experimenting with new technologies to affect policy and usage;
implementing pilot studies and instances of existing ideas;
developing schemes to integrate education and technology; public
intervention and awareness campaigns geared towards particular
outcomes; celebrating certain aspects of internet technologies;
engaging with digital natives; and creating new environments of
learning and participation online.</p>
<p>The CPP is <strong>NOT</strong> a grant making programme. However, we are
interested in partnering on new and innovative ideas and would
welcome conversations with people and organisations in the field. If
you have an interesting idea that you think fits our larger vision,
please contact us and we can begin the discussions.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>List of Projects under the Collaborative Projects Programme:</strong></p>
<p>1. The Promise of Invisibility: Technology and the City - A seven month research project initiated by Nishant Shah, in collaboration with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Shanghai University, enabled by a grant from the Asia Scholarship Foundation, Bangkok.</p>
<p>2. Disability, Learning and Digital Participation - in partnership with <a class="external-link" href="http://www.inclusiveplanet.org/">Inclusive Planet</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/collaborative-projects-programme'>http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/collaborative-projects-programme</a>
</p>
No publishernishantCyberspaceFamilyDigital NativesPublic AccountabilityObscenitye-governanceCyborgsCyberculturesProjectsNew PedagogiesCommunitiesDigital subjectivitiesDigital Pluralism2011-08-23T03:04:56ZPage