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Round Table on Assessing the Efficacy of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for Public Initiatives: A Report

Round Table on Assessing the Efficacy of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for Public Initiatives: A Report

by Sanchia de Souza — Jun 29, 2009 03:55 AM

Zainab Bawa reports on the Round Table on Assessing the Efficacy of Information and Communication Technologies for Public Initiatives, hosted by the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, on 17 June 2009, in collaboration with the Liberty Institute, New Delhi.

Using Social Media for Mobilisation: Discussion with Dina Mehta and Peter Griffin

by Sanchia de Souza — Jun 25, 2009 06:37 PM

Zainab Bawa reports on the discussion with Peter Griffin and Dina Mehta, hosted at CIS on 19 June 2009, on 'Using Social Media for Mobilisation'.

Call for a South Asian Collective of Archivists and Historians

by Aparna Balachandran — Jun 22, 2009 11:32 AM

In this blog entry, CIS-RAW researchers Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto (working on the project 'Archive and Access), along with five other researchers, invite archivists, librarians and historians from South Asia to form a collective that focuses on issues of access.

Report on Second National Workshop on Web Accessibility, 5-7 June 2009

by Sanchia de Souza — Jun 26, 2009 11:29 AM

Nirmita Narsimhan reports on the second National Workshop on Web Accessibility for web developers, hosted by CIS in Bangalore from 5 to 7 June 2009, and attended by 15 participants.

Follow-up Letter in Support of WIPO Treaty for Reading Disabled

by Sanchia de Souza — Jun 12, 2009 03:48 PM

CIS has sent another letter to the Department of Higher Education, Ministry for Human Resource Development, petitioning it to support the WIPO Treaty for the reading disabled.

Consumers International IP Watch List 2009

by Pranesh Prakash — Jun 05, 2009 02:51 PM

In response to the US Special 301 report, Consumers International brought out an IP Watch List. CIS contributed the India Country Report for the Watch List.

'Internet and Deliberative Democracy': Panel Discussion Featuring Sunil Abraham, Philippe Aigrain and Mario Losano

by Sanchia de Souza — Jun 04, 2009 12:24 PM

Sunil Abraham, Director, Advocacy, Centre for Internet and Society, attended the first edition of the Biennale Democrazia in Turin, 22-26 April 2009. He participated in a panel discussion on the topic 'Internet and Deliberative Democracy'. This blog entry links to a video of his contribution to the discussion.

Letter on South Africa's IPRs from Publicly Financed R&D Regulations

by Pranesh Prakash — Jun 02, 2009 05:36 PM

Being interested in legislations in developing nations styled after the United States' Bayh-Dole Act, CIS responded to the call issued by the South African Department of Science and Technology for comments to the Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research and Development Regulations.

WIPO Broadcast Treaty and Webcasting

by Pranesh Prakash — May 26, 2009 01:25 PM

On Friday, 8 May 2009, at Shastri Bhavan, New Delhi, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting held a stakeholders' briefing meeting on the Broadcast Treaty that has been on the table at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). The purpose of that meeting was to inform the relevant stakeholders of the developments in Geneva, as well as to garner input from them regarding the stance to be adopted by India at the WIPO. Pranesh Prakash from the Centre for Internet and Society participated and made a presentation on webcasting, highlighting the differences between webcasting and broadcasting, and arguing that webcasting should not be part of the WIPO Broadcast Treaty.

Seminar on Exceptions and Limitations in Copyright

by Sanchia de Souza — May 21, 2009 06:01 PM

This is a report on a seminar organised by the Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Human Resource Development, and Government of India on 14 and 15 May 2009, in Kochi, Kerala, to look at exceptions and limitations in copyright. Programme Manager Nirmita Narsimhan, of the Centre for Internet and Society, attended the seminar.

Publications

Report on Open Standards for GISW 2008

by Pranesh Prakash — Dec 07, 2008 10:40 PM

 

Public Access to the Internet

by Sunil Abraham — Oct 11, 2008 03:55 PM

Paper by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam. The advent of the Internet brought with it hitherto unheard of possibilities for human creativity, information access, and global communication. When did these possibilities actually translate into widespread public access to the Internet? It is difficult to specify a date, but possible to identify a few key developments and the key actors behind those developments.

Design in urban democracy: A question of survival

by Sunil Abraham — Oct 11, 2008 03:19 PM

Urban dynamics dissected by John Thackara and Sunil Abraham; questions and answers on the anatomy of cities. An article from the August issue of Cluster Magazine.

Now Streaming on Your Nearest Screen

by Sanchia de Souza — May 07, 2009 05:30 PM

Digital cinema, especially the kinds that is produced using mobile devices and travelling on internet social networking systems like Youtube and Myspace, are often dismissed as apolitical and ‘merely’ a fad rather than a cultural expression and a choice. Moreover, with content that is in non-English language, incomprehensibility or lack of understanding of the cultural context of the production or circulation, leads to easy labelling of the object as frivolous, trivial, or inconsequential. Deploying the aesthetic framework of Kuso – the Japanese term for ‘Shit’; often invoked in anime, manga, and certain kinds of lifestyle choices – as a way of political engagement, this essay analyses the Strawberry Generation in Taiwan, to look at how an ‘aesthetic’ form of expression might offer spaces of political participation and negotiation for these digital natives. Drawing from the emergence of the ‘BackDorm Boys’ as iconic representations of the youth like popular narratives of Stephen Chow’s creation of flawed stardom, and interactions with younger students about their politics, aesthetics, consumption and lifestyle choices, this paper hopes to explore the possibilities that new digital cinema and their circuits of circulation offer for political engagement and participation through cultural expressions and productions, which are otherwise dismissed in contemporary discourse. This article was published in the Journal of Chinese Cinema.

(e)Governance by selection

by Nishant Shah — Nov 04, 2008 02:07 AM

The paper was presented at the Technology, Governance, Citizenship conference at the Indian Institute of Bangalore, and explores the processes of urban restructuration, positing of new digital citizenship, and the way in which technologised globalisation is implicated in the process. Looking at the instance of the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project in Ahmedabad - a part of the Mega City project in India, the paper looks at the tropes of desire, ambition and aspiration as ways by which people relate and belong to circuits of technology but are often made invisible in the popular rhetoric of e-governance policies in India.

Network as a unit of CMC

by Nishant Shah — Nov 04, 2008 01:50 AM

The paper was presented at the Inter Asia Cultural Studies Conference, on a panel on the Digital DNA. The Database, the Archive, and the Network have emerged as the most critical cultural icons of the digital age. The Database is not only a simple sorting and arrangement of different materials. The network is a potent metaphor to map the quickly changing topography of the world with the advent of new internet and telecommunication technologies. The Archive contains ephemeral and fluid components like memory, desire, longing and aspirations as conditioned and constructed by the very technologies that build the archive. With digital globalization producing cities, spaces, and identities heavily mediated by the digital technologies, the database becomes the interface through which the cities and bodies and how the state regulates and controls them to produce new conditions of citizenship, can be understood and analysed. The Network links these databases to produce spaces, cities, bodies, and nation states in new transnational orbits. The Archive serves as a way through which belonging to these spaces and subjectivities become possible. As the database adopts fluid architecture, mixing different set of informational archives to produce new identities, the Network emerges as an infinite, interminable set of legitimised objects, identities and spaces in new politics of power and economy.

Once Upon a Flash

by Nishant Shah — Nov 04, 2008 01:55 AM

The essay was published as a part of Sarai Annual Reader titled 'Turbulence' and explores the aesthetics, politics and form of the flashmobs and their manifestation in India. It looks at the potentials of the flashmob to produce turbulent physical spaces and identities and their encounter with legalities. The essay is also available at http://www.sarai.net/journal/06_pdf/03/04_nishant_shah.pdf

The Curious Incident of the People at the Mall

by Nishant Shah — Dec 14, 2008 05:43 PM

The first flash mob in India, in 2003, though short-lived and quickly declared illegal, brought to fore the idea that technology is constructing new sites of defining public participation and citizenship rights, forcing the State to recognise them as political collectives. As India emerges as an ICT enabled emerging economy, new questions of citizenship, participatory politics, social networking, citizenship, and governance are being posed. In the telling of the story of the flash-mob, doing a historical review of technology and access, and doing a symptomatic reading of the subsequent events that followed the ban, this paper evaluates the different ways in which the techno-narratives of an ‘India Shining’ campaign of prosperity and economic growth, are accompanied by various spaces of political contestation, mobilisation and engagement that determine the new public spheres of exclusion, marked by the aesthetics of cyberspatial matrices and technology enabled conditions of governance.

Playblog: Pornography, Performance, and Cyberspace

by Nishant Shah — Nov 04, 2008 01:39 AM

The essay makes a distinction between internet pornography (a genre that is shaped through internet technologies) and pornography (in earlier forms like print, moving images, visuals, comics, etc.) available on the internet, to make an argument around pleasure principle and pornographic pleasure, exploring the phenomenon of private blogging and form net-porn as one of the tropes by which the personal web can be understood. The essay first appeared in Cut-up magazine (available at http://www.cut-up.com/news/detail.php?sid=413) and was later included in the anthology "C'LICK ME: Netporn Studies Reader".

Material Cyborgs; Asserted Boundaries

by Nishant Shah — Nov 04, 2008 01:44 AM

The essay was published in the European Journal of English Studies in a special issue on Multimedia Narratives. Emerging as an epistemological category with the rise of the Information and Communication Technologies, the cyborg leads to a complex set of negotiations about the production of a cyborg identity. This paper looks at the cyborg as a translator, to see the new mechanics of translation that come into play as the cyborg straddles multiple systems of making meaning and producing itself. Analysing the new social networking systems that have emerged in the last few years, the paper posits the cyborg as not only an author of translated texts but also as produced in the processes of translation. Focusing on one particular instance of the production of a cyborg identity, exploring the various players involved in the process of cyborgification and the material consequences of imagining the cyborg, the paper seeks to analyse the new incomprehensibility or illegalities that the cyborg, in its role as a translator, gets produced within.

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