You THINK Digital?

You CONNECT using digital devices and gadgets?

You ACT digital, always clicking, linking, posting, tagging and Liking?

You know what it means To Be digital!

Tell us your Digital Story. What makes your life so click-worthy?

Submit your idea online: https://www.research.net/s/BZXQPHL | Top 10 video finalists win EURO 500 EACH!!!

Deadline: 26 January 2012

Contest Website: http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 6,900 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Where I Try Playing Catch-up With My Favorite ‘Fictional’ Stars By Stalking Their Real Life Counterparts. *Warning: This article makes frequent references to the Twilight Saga, non-Twihard fans, suck in that incredulity, now.

Street stalking is actually passe. It’s too much of an effort hiding behind the bushes outside your favorite movie star’s house, waiting for a peek into the color of Brad Pitt’s underpants or whatever amuses the fantasies of celeb stalkers. If it’s all about getting a deeper insight – and a bit of a peep – into what makes your idol tick, then pay attention to the bits and pieces of information they drop in interviews.

You know that feeling, when you read an interview of your beloved movie star or author and chance upon references to books, movies and music that caught their imagination and you follow the trail, helpless, for you want an inch more of insight into the workings of their brilliant minds? The trail of their favorites leads you into interviews of the directors, poets and playwrights whose works are the stuff of inspiration for the favorite directors of your favorite writers. Pretty much like keeping up with Inception. An overwhelming anxiety to keep up with what inspires some of the most admired and adored – if not brightest or insightful – celebrated personalities of our times.

I can certainly never keep up with reading all the interviews of some of my fav Hollywood stars – Pacino, De Niro, Edward Norton, Jennifer Connelly, Cate Blanchett and the scores of others involved in movie making who aren’t really considered celebs, but are rockstars in their own rights. And this is just films! I haven’t even begun with my favorite writers, musicians, playwrights and sportspersons, the artists, painters, stand-up comedians, craftsmen and spiritual gurus.

One of my favorite, all-time-top-of-the-list Manga series is ‘Ghost in the Shell‘, which includes anime books, television spin-offs, series and video games. To keep up with the latest gossip on the franchise, I Googled for interviews of the director of the film Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, Mr Mamoru Oshii and was soon sucked into a maze of verbal conflagrations and Descartesian jousts all tangling up for a Minestrone fare that served Buddha, Confucius, the Old Testament, Saito Ryokuu, Richard Dawkins, Max Weber, Jacob Grimm, Plato, Milton, and La Mettrie, author of “Man a Machine” time-traveling from 6th century B.C. India to 1748 and later in Germany. Mindblown? You bet!  

Fanning a Fantasy

To be honest, it’s not really Pacino I am in love with. I mean, of course, I admire his towering talent and his dedication to the movie-making craft. But more obvious, it’s the characters he has portrayed over the years that I am in love with. And in the other extremes of intellectual cliches, it’s not Robert Pattinson that my heart does lhub-dhub for. It’s the undead, diamond-dazzling, blood-sucking vampire Edward Cullen that he portrays that I get wistful for. When we cyber-hunt for clues into Rob’s favorite book or best friend, we are waiting to see if the flesh-and-blood Rob matches up to the undead Cullen he plays in the Twilight series. The more he real life star admits to sharing traits with his fictional counterpart, the more his fans will idolize and typecast him as the stuff of their fantasies.

So, I really dig New York Times sections such as ‘What’s On Your Mind’ or other web regulars like ‘Here’s What They are Reading’ et al. It gives me a peek into the minds of my idol and allows me to play catch-up with them. That feeling of comradeship and empathy is acutely intense when you see your beloved idol gushing about a movie that you absolutely loved – across the distance, you and he / she somehow shared a moment of similitude, enough to throw you together in your mental universe at least!

Keeping up with the eloquent and intellectual celebs is also a good benchmark to see how well you measure up on an intellectual ballpark with those you admire and aspire to emulate. I certainly don’t have any plans of being an actor, but it helps to know that the qualities I admire in say, Cate Blanchett, are somehow shaped by her reading or movie preferences, or the places she travels to or the fashion show she was enraptured with. If I too could partake a tiny portion of her habits, perhaps, I too would be somewhere in the vicinity of the path of greatness that Blanchett is already on. But that’s not the point exactly. The whole exercise pivots on the fact that I love Blanchett for who she has been across so many movies. My admiration for her is largely mixed in with my love for her make-believe personas and what that character would be reading, listening to or cooking right now – something that I could emulate perhaps – and not Blanchett herself.

Jumping Through Hyper-Links

The hyper-linked, multi-tabbed world of Web 2.0 is such a great sleuthing platform for precisely this sort of sifting, categorizing, fine-tuning, and capitulation. Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar and People Magazine are some of the ‘tell-tale’ pages I follow to keep up with celeb gossip, news and morsels of savory information about their arty pursuits. It’s simply impossible to scroll down an interview of James Franco (Spiderman, 127 Hours, Planet of the Apes) without being bombarded with references to his four (inhuman) advanced level courses that he’s signed up for at university. It clearly follows that he talks in length about his favorite writers, movies that he loves and actors whom he derives inspiration from – all hyperlinked keywords which lead me to more fascinating pages on food, culture, entertainment, arts, fashion, money, politics and travel. It’s a heady hyperlinked journey that you embark on, floating on the lulling, rhythmic cadence of your fantasy star’s thoughts.

I am furiously opening several tabs even as I bookmark several pages for a leisurely read at a later date. Of course, the kick is potent when your senses are swirled in the heady feeling of being hot on the trail of not just one, but several of your literary, cinematic and musical idols – simultaneously. I recently read this interview of

Let me not be shy of introducing my latest pet peeve – Edward ‘Bloodsucker’ Cullen aka Robert Pattinson, who suffered the ignominy of playing Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (shudder at that foul memory of Cullen then). For us Twihard fans, Robert Pattinson exists only as Edward Cullen and the vampire certainly cannot exist in a parallel universe as Cedric Diggory. There can be only one Edward (I know, a bit dramatic, but that’s the world of Young Adult-Vampire fiction) and when we follow Robert’s interviews in the media, it’s only to cull information that would help us flesh out Edward in our imagination. While the actor struggles to understand this strange fascination for the fictional character, his obvious discomfort with the attention only seems to add to the image of Cullen that we glean from the books. Twihards (Twilight fans) have this heightened expectation that he remain unchanged for them, in the fictional but very persuasive world of the town of Forks, and it doesn’t take much to convince us that it’s Cullen who’s the real entity, with Pattinson just playing a stand-by. Frightening, that thought.

As Close As It Gets

And it’s at that point, when the scales are tipped to cross elation into the territory known as ‘creeping anxiety’ that I recently got my wake up call. Pattinson strictly abhors the world of Twilight and the ensuing media-frenzy and fan-saga it has engendered. While Edward Cullen also hates drawing attention from humans, his is a reticence that seduces the reader, where as Pattinson’s real life aversion borders on lack of poise crossed with social-anxiety-disorder; would have been a total turn-off if it weren’t for the fact that Pattinson acknowledges this pet peeve and goes off on a tangent about all this being new for him. Endearing no?

When I read some of the personalities that caught Pattinson’s interest, including Rolling Stone founding member Keith Richards, I felt a swift disconnect. Having no interest in 80s Rock, I went back to my fantasy of what Edward Cullen would have liked and devoured in his fictional world – Debussy, that’s who, and with Wuthering Heights and Jane Austen thrown in for good measure! If the flesh-and-blood Hollywood star doesn’t have reading habits that match up to his fictional avatar, then my Twilight-hazed mind was finding it a bit difficult to acknowledge this reality. A fan’s righteousness knows no right … or left.

To be sure, Pattinson, like most of his talented industry colleagues, are due a tremendous degree of respect for the effortless ways in which they manage to erase their personas just so that their make-believe alter egos can thrive. Its that talent that drives the fans flocking to watch their every movie, hoping for shades of their favorite parts in subsequent roles that their movie stars essay. It’s that aura of brilliance that gets fans like me hoarding their every quip, bookmarking their every quote and signing-up for every official Production House website that advertises their forthcoming films (or albums or art shows). But this is as good as it gets. We can only keep up with our idols’ current reads and favorite restaurants. We cannot have a piece of their mind (much as we like to think of it as succulent, rich and creative). To be acknowledged as a fan requires us to live in that unbreacheable distance between anticipation and achievement.

- Nilofar Ansher

What I have been noticing of late on my Twitter and Facebook stream is that a lot of friends and follows have become ‘vocal’ about the contents of their spam folder. I frequently see jokes like, “It broke my heart to say no to $50,000 from United Nations, but I am noble like that” or “Girls, tonight’s the drinks on me. Mrs Shayla Lopez from Cayman Islands has willed all her bank funds to me”. I am sure you guys have hilarious spam mails and promotional sms messages hitting your inboxes every day.

So, what is spam? To begin with, spam is not merely a commercial message or a promotional email sent over by a sweating, white-collared marketing executive mass mailing 100,000 messages to a random database just to meet a deadly monthly sales target! Spam is, firstly, unsolicited (we don’t ask for it) – mailers and brochures that are slipped beneath our doors, phone calls from telemarketers, sms (short messaging services) promoting the launch of a product or some insurance schemes that we don’t sign up for.

Secondly, most email and sms spam is automated, meaning, they are not sent by that hard-working marketing guy, rather an automated program or bot is fed a database of millions of web addresses, blog urls (or mobile numbers), inviting us to click on a link, respond to a message, sign up on a new website, or verify/confirm our residential address. It’s all automated because companies have a huge market segment to target and a limited budget to reach its audience. ‘Spamming’ then becomes an easy – but ineffective – way of reaching maximum eyeballs.

A researcher from Centre for Internet and Society, India, undertook an interesting experiment when she decided to reply to one of her regular spammers! Having received the winning notification of $550,000 from Shell BP Manchester (Shell is one of the world’s biggest petroleum companies), the researcher decided to take the ‘dubious’ (not authentic) emailer on his claims and replied to the address mentioned. In the series of response-and-reply, what became clear is that although Shell BP Manchester appeared to be a registered company – with the Queen of England’s blessing too – the spam emailer was clearly after the researcher’s money. Here’s what they said in one of their last correspondence:

“Do not discuss your winning with anybody until your prize has been transferred to you. It is for your own good. And it is at that time alone that you can be used for advert purposes by our company. So the success of this transfer lies sorely in your hands. These are the exact words from the Director this morning.”

Being an academic researcher on digital culture, the researcher obviously wasn’t fooled into sending any real money to Shell BP Manchester, however, think about the thousands of men and women, with no hands-on knowledge about spam, bots or malware. What is really the tricky part about spam messages, and I would go so far as to say evil actually  – is that the actionable instructions required in the email – sign up, click here, send us your address – play into our very real “wish list”: loads of money in American dollars, an all-expense-paid vacation to an exotic island, an anonymous stranger transferring all her property and wealth to our name. Wouldn’t you agree that most of us dream of a shortcut to ending our middle-class status and when we happen to see a subject line saying ‘congratulations, you have won $100,000′, for an infinitely small moment we do want that spam to be true…

And that desire or aspiration is exactly what marketing companies (both the legitimate and the fraudulent ones) count on to catch our attention. The subject lines are well-known – Congratulations!!!, Attention Plz!!, My Dear Madam, Greetings!! Urgent Message! all get filtered as spam, because business emails don’t ever carry such headings. While legitimate messages promoting a product can be irritating and most of us simply ignore them, fake emails claiming we have won a lottery – when we clearly didn’t even buy a ticket – all count on our collective desire to be rich, at the expense of our common sense.

It wasn’t always about riches though. A couple of years ago, my email filter would spam messages for Erectile Dysfunction, Viagra, and various other strange-sounding pharmacological products and pills. And where there is Viagra, you’re sure to find spam-ads for XXX sites.

Spam messages also play into the blind faith we place in the names of big corporations. Anything that comes stamped with BMW, Yahoo, BBC or Chevron in the subject line immediately grabs our attention – and also ups our heart beat – perhaps IBM Corporation has a job for me! If you follow up on the links inside the spam email, the websites also look authentic, nothing to raise the doubts of those new to net surfing – our parents, for instance, who might not have used computers until recently; teenagers and kids who won’t think twice before giving up their home addresses. A quick research throws up statistics of cyber crime in the area of phishing, fraudulent sites, spam links that lead to virus and installation of malware on your computer, and thousands of email users losing money every year as they were tricked into paying up.

We have handed over control of spam to filters that come built-in with our email client and those who are tech-savvy further weed out junk mail by applying keyword filters to messages. Most of us though still browse through our spam box once a week or fortnight hoping that Gmail or Yahoo’s filter haven’t chucked an important or authentic email from an unknown but important person or company. Spam is a barometer of this generation’s aspirations and what most of us desire – for the moment, it’s about getting rich, quick. Another five years down the line we would probably be spammed with spaceship rides to the moon, cloning, or ______________… fill in the blanks, your futuristic guess is as good as anyone’s.

For further reading: http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html

This censorship took unexpected forms following the Citizen Revolutions of the Middle East and Africa. Now, social media websites and related services and apps have come increasingly under the scanner of the State; not only that, telecommunication services are also barred with the justification that citizens are taking the law into their hands by misusing them (the services) to encourage disobedience and revolt.

That’s the current scenario and many of us either deal with it on a daily basis while some others post information about censored sites in their social networking groups. There are still others, the digital activists and concerned ‘web privacy and freedom’ citizen groups who take up the cause of censorship with the State through campaigns, letters, taking the matter to the media, and conducting workshops that involve creating awareness among the Public.

While online censorship is currently making news because of the force of recent affairs, we must not forget that mass media goods such as films, music and books have also been under continuous scanner by the State since the time these materials came to produced en masse (in bulk, disseminated to a larger and wider audience). Before a movie is released in cinema halls, it comes rated with a certificate (A, U/A, G, R) by the State Film Censorship Board. On television, all the soap operas and advertisements that we enjoy are also scanned for violence, explicit language, vulgar or obscene scenes, and so are music albums: all CDs / cassettes are supposed to carry mandatory warning if they contain adult / explicit language.

Censorship has been used by the State since ages to control information and content that it feels is detrimental to its well-being; order, security, cohesion, and disciple are the pillars of a well-controlled state. The way this feature is expressed, though, is through exhibiting concern for the welfare of the citizen. Films or TV serials are not exhibited without censorship as it might impact an unsupervised kid (parents have gone out, and a kid may be watching a horror movie) or teens who might not be mature enough to watch sexually explicit scenes that your local cable guy showcases every weekend.

According to the Supreme Court of India:

 So, while censorship is NOT a foolproof way to “save” kids or other vulnerable audience from media content, the alternative – free, unrestricted, violent and sexually graphic material available anywhere – is also not appealing. I find the idea of censorship is justified primarily because mass media is everywhere now and adults / parents / guardians cannot always supervise the books, comics, films, music, serials, and the 100s of other audio-video content that children below 18 get their hands on!

What concerns me more today is the proliferation of material online and the easy access to the same. While it took money to buy a video cassette or music CD once upon a time, today, with 24×7 net access, the same content is easily available on YouTube or any torrent site for free download. How then can the State regulate access to such content and make it age appropriate?

Perhaps the State could make it mandatory for all media producers to mark their content on a universal web rating? The clauses and principles of such a system could be discussed at international forums where government departments, media producers, civil society members, educators, cultural practitioners and other public stakeholders meet and agree upon.

All websites could carry a ratings symbol in the address bar space, which shows details of its certificate when the mouse hovers on it. But the devil is in the details, right! How would you classify the range of audio-textual, video-graphical, literary-porno materials and the permutation-combination content that the web is filled with? We would need a multitude of classification – and not just the broad, universal symbols for General, Adult, Parental Guidance, etc.

In the US, viewing online pornography is illegal if under 18

Secondly, what is the guarantee that online content with State-approved ratings won’t be accessed by those without permission? As a teenager, I still managed to get my hands on “crazy stuff”, what could possibly deny access to others? This is when unique online IDs would be of big help. Everyone logging online must have a permanent net-ID that would have minimal but vital information about their age, guardian information and locality. So, pornography, violent video games or erotic literature would be automatically locked to those under 15.

But isn’t it rather odd that from childhood to the age of 18, we are kept safe from the harmful effects of violence and vulgarity, but the day we hit the magic age, we suddenly develop the mental and emotional capacity to see brutal murders, rape, obscene songs on television?

There are so many issues that my blog doesn’t provide answers to. What is the minimum age at which it becomes ‘normal’ to view a violent film? Some teens are more mature than others and can handle mature books, so won’t censorship affect them? In many countries, having consensual sex in your early teens is legal and girls below 15 also have babies – so could we bar them from viewing adult material when they have done everything possibly adult!

Information has always been a bargaining chip, across all societies and hierarchies of power. There are groups who are fighting for a free and open web space, while there are others who are practising anarchy. In counterpoint, the State tries harder everyday to bring everyone and everything under surveillance. Is there no middle ground to my concern? Would love to hear from my readers.

Note: MyCyberTwin.com is a web-based artificial intelligence service founded by tech-duo Liesl Capper and John Zakos in 2005. Launched in April 2007, the service now claims in excess of34,400 users who have a ‘cyber twin’ or a chat-bot. Promoted as a service that seamlessly represents users anytime online, and across multiple platforms, including web, mobile, Instant Messenger, and virtual environments, mycybertwin.com can be deployed for the personal and home user, social media addict, large-scale corporations and businesses, government portals and so on.

Book 1: To Be / Cover by Noopur Raval

Each of us exhibits a digital signature that is peculiar to what or who we are online. These take the form of avatars. My avatar receives its cues from its offline ‘twin’. However, I neither deliberate over its responses nor do I have a conscious say in its growth. The body of reference that builds from my online detritus does not always accumulate in a controlled environment. The mycybertwin.com web service allows me to do just that: Artificially engineer a twin and let it loose on cyberspace as my virtual representation.

Introduction

How do we map representation online? How are our avatars perceived? Do we have autonomy to represent textual and non-textual information about ourselves in the manner we want to? Little trails lead people into forming definitive ideas of what makes you tick (Liking a Facebook page about Seinfeld must mean I am a fan of stand-up comedy, right?), and larger clues help reinforce semi-permanent prejudices (not having a Facebook account must mean I am anti-social, right?). Our avatars grow from the cues and stimuli we provide from this side of the screen, and then transform into independent personalities in their own right.

The case-study that follows details my exercise in understanding how we define and design identities online. I did this by signing up on MyCyberTwin, a web service that allows you to ‘engineer’ your avatar – what they refer to as cyber twin.

To read the essay further, please download Book 1 – To Be, here: or alternately, you can view it here.

If posts are representations of a person – their voice, so to speak – what does it say about group behaviour online when we ignore or remain neutral to status updates?

In a fit of frenzy, when I was feeling particularly stir-crazy, I deleted the more than 100 posts I had up on a Facebook group I am part of. A hundred-odd status updates, news and information links, poetry, polls, video, and photo uploads that were specific to the interests and theme of the group – digital native culture. The hardest part was the fact that of the 70-plus members, not a one noticed this ‘transgression’. The most surprising fact is that I didn’t get all hyper-emotional for losing vital bits of what I had invested in the group for more than a year. So, what gives?

Well, it wasn’t all mayhem. I was particularly interested in finding out if, firstly, would anyone notice the missing posts; secondly; would anyone ‘miss’ the deletions on an emotional note; thirdly, would it concern anyone enough that posts that were Liked, Commented and Gushed over were no longer available to the group as an archive; fourth, did anyone think that I unfairly deleted posts that was partly, group property, considering so many of them commented and expressed considered opinions on them; and lastly, what are the qualities that we attribute to posts – are they merely information bytes, or do people use them as reference to understand the person behind the posts?

The last point is crucial to delve into considering that group members on Facebook hardly meet each other, especially if the original way they came together was virtual and not an offline-meet up-turned-cyber-hangout. So, the way we interact within a group is, apart from one-on-one or one-to-many group chats is primarily through the dozen postings. The posts become a guide to form impressions on group members: someone who simply Likes several hundred posts over the year but never responds through comments would be considered a lurker or a introvert, neutral or talk-shy person. At other times, posters can be classified as information sharers, information consumers, opinion makers, persuaders or other personality-types within groups. There is much to make sense of from those posts!

In a group, an overt response to your post or links is the only way to ascertain if you have been heard. Posts serve an informational as well as emotive, neutral or non-descript functional values. Being seen as ‘data’ rather than a person’s voice makes it difficult to formulate a framework within which we make sense of the way we “treat” persons and their online contribution.

Coming back to the original sleuthing goals, if no one missed the deletions and hardly anyone noticed that certain important news links or Infographics are gone forever, what does that say about the ‘value’ we ascribe to people as well as the collective presence of a group? That’s just like posting a Facebook update, ‘I am feeling miserable after my dog died’, for example and no one decides to respond to it. And is it really about a calculative action: do I, should I comment or Like beneath an update, do I skip it over, do I scroll to more interesting news; do we deliberate over it so consciously?

This brings us to the question: Are all posts given the same value? Perhaps, some of you might already ask to change the interrogative context to, ‘Should all the posts be given the same value’ for which the answer would be an obvious no. Think about this, while conversing in a physically present group on a physical plane, you make an announcement or talk about the most mundane of things, knowing that you have the surety, guarantee, of being heard. After all, your voice can’t be shut out. It’s a different matter to gauge whether your group is paying attention to your speech or if they are tuning you out. However, you are guaranteed feedback, either through verbal or a facial cue, or via body language. If the importance we assign to posts is set at an arbitrary level, no one is guaranteed any measurable response and the Message Board of Facebook, Twitter or any other social media site just becomes another graffiti wall, no response required, it’s all over in the process itself.

Ok, so the sum-total of all my energies and efforts to curate interesting links for the group and start an inspiration thread on a post-Singularity dystopian future didn’t so much as register a blip on the attention radar of the members when it all (the posts) vanished overnight. I waited, tapped fingernails on keyboard, prayed to the cyber-goddess shakti to salvage my vanity, and eventually the impatient hyper-enthusiast in me leaked the ‘secret’ to a couple of group members. The reaction? They ended up seeing my riotous deletions as a “lol, fun” activity rather than a “subversive experiment in chronicling the value of our textual detritus” that I intended it to be. So much for Rainbow’s Gravity.

Well, I have erased all traces of my past. I have erased the back story that made references to what gave me a kick and what saddened me. I bet, I bet you a good deal of the gold pot at the end of the rainbow that not many of you would remember a quarter of all I said, debated, disliked or even stayed non-committal about. If you don’t have proof of the text that gave evidence to my existence as a group member, what are you going to rely on to talk to me today? Are your impressions of me good enough to keep us going for another year? Were you paying attention to me? Or are you just another info-junkie feeding off the textual high of reading, sifting, collecting, linking and sharing data?

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Remembering What Is Left Behind

The alphabets wax and wane
the afterimage of a fly’s winged path
eluding capture
except in bursts and blasts

And when all is but memory
When I no longer breathe my last
Neither shall the words remain
To stand testimony of my past

All is deleted, all is erased
What surfaces to the top
Are others’ traces
half three quarters of forget-me-nots

- Nilofar Ansher

Being social today is best listed out in four keywords that can be represented as a circle: being social involves making the personal public; second, it means documenting and archiving what is public; and finally, social involves crowdsourcing – recycling the public back into the personal space.

The cycle I just described would actually be part of mass culture barely two decades ago but is now a given in the personal life of a digital native. Our preferences for products, the places we visit or the conversations we have with friends were never ‘formulated’ in isolation, however, for the digital native, it’s all a public spectacle that gets talked, commented, flagged, shared and voted upon continuously.

The ‘app’ market is a place that magnifies this spectator-performance relationship, as if we are on stage performing to a crowd. I recently came across an app for Android that let’s you track your exercise, weight and food intake schedule across a fixed number of days and then share it on Facebook or Twitter (if you want to). What would prompt me to publicize my exercise regimen or the number of sandwiches I gulped in a day to my followers? The incentives to share are remarkably non-monetary and unmeasurable; there is no reward or points gained to share updates of your exercise routine with the world, however, it’s a normative behavior to inform your wall, board and blank box that you are up to ‘something’.

Never Miss Another Moment

Proust is a web app that allows you to record your memories online, beginning from your earliest recollections to your most recent, divided as per the stages of your life. The Austin, Texas-based Michael and Susan Dell Foundation has released Ed-Fi data standard that allows educators and colleges to track student records from an ATM-like machine, from KG up to high school.  Then you have Capture, who’s tagline runs like this: Never miss another moment! Capture is like a record button for your home screen. It immediately starts recording video after launch and saves the video to your Camera Roll after it quits. This is ably assisted by Broadcaster, a social-media platform for location-based audio. “Our free app lets people easily create and share recordings on an interactive map. Users share oral histories, restaurant reviews, walking tours, citizen journalism, personal messages, funny anecdotes, and more.”

Online Leveraging Mechanism

If it wasn’t enough to just share your activities online, we have apps and platforms that encourage you to ‘measure’ the influence of your avatar. Number of followers? Oh that’s passe. The new social-media influence calculators cull data from all your messages, tweets and updates and let you know how powerful your cyber social status is. Check out Empire Ave, that plugs itself as the Social Stock Market, where you can grow your social capital online. Here’s how it works: You discover people online and then based on scores or share price invest virtual currency in their profiles by buying shares in the Social Stock Market. And there is Klout and PeerIndex, which measure your influence on your followers.

These apps don’t explain ‘why’ you need to measure your influence. The apps don’t come with any disclaimers that mention the lack of any legitimate value or use of their products. Once again, the marketing department and digital media simply advertise the “coolness” of a new app release and pretend as if it’s the next best thing to hit our social lives – our cyber social lives that is.

Feeding Frenzy

I have listed but a fraction of the millions of apps available for free that will take the thinking, planning and doing out of your hands. You only have to download and install and set the ‘start’ button, the rest is outsourced to your digital assistants. There is an app that calculates the number of glasses of water you require in a day, and another that allow you to outsource your laundry, bill and car service chores to ‘helper bunnies” while you are running late for work. Of course, you have a whole bunch of fun, useless and silly apps that are designed for that ’99 cents download’ bait: enough downloads means enough money to cover the cost of creating the app.

What happens next? Now that I have all these apps downloaded on my mobile phone, I spend a lot of waking moments tracking my activities on them. Are the clouds foggy enough on my weather app? Have I taken enough screen break from my computer, reminds another app on my phone. I guess when a notepad and pen for a to-do list worked for me at one point, why and how did I get so dependent on my apps to keep my life functional? The trick is with the user interface, the really cool sounds and animation that entice me to spend some more time with the program. 

The reality now is that for every app, wall or blank box created, there are equal millions of users impatient to fill it up with micro-details and share. Everyone wants to be heard, everyone has something clever, momentous or significant happening in their life. ‘What are you doing’ and ‘What’s up’ are cues for us to open up, speak out and make meaning out of our meaningless routines. Our routines are given significance because others acknowledge it, comment about it and give us further cues and messages that reinforce ideas about ourselves. Apps are relationship conduits in essence, marking our moments, our dialogues, our expressions and imprints, both online and offline.

In essence, if we have outsourced our life to apps and apps in turn crowdsource information from the public, are we looking at a future where the personal is not only about being social, but also about being public 24×7? If apps run our lives for us – work, love, prayer (yes, we have virtual blessings now!), sports and games, homework, career choices – what are we doing here?  

- Nilofar Ansher

So, how do I come off on a moral high ground and err on the side of governance, especially since I label myself a digital native – a post-modern netizen, and therefore (perhaps, irrationally), subscriber to all things free, open and even anarchic? And yes, this is a battle and there are sides. Either you want a cyberspace with curfews and lock downs or a Wild West Frontier, where it’s a free for all.

Perhaps a call for governance comes from a self-defined righteousness of the situation. I consider myself in danger (will come to this later), and so, think it’s my moral right to ask for protection. In turn, it’s the duty of the government to protect me. Built-in are the dialectics of trust and responsibility, freedom and power, order and privacy, safety and intrusion; these antonyms constantly warring with each other in a space that is nebulous – and virtual. Unlike statehood or borders to a city, the boundaries of virtual cities are not staked to rulers yet.

History has taught us that no town or village, no city or state progresses without the creation and evolution of complex political structures of control and regulation. A burgeoning population signals the arrival of crime in various degrees and we turn to a single entity to set things in order. It’s a different matter that those in power also wreck havoc, however, it’s also true that a diverse set of people competing for the same resources do not adhere to reason – they subscribe to governance.

The online world is no different from ‘real’ society in this regards. In the early 90s, the Internet was this proto-tribe or clan with no definite chieftains staking claim to territories. Netizens explored lands, settled down in areas where they found resources, formed communities, built tools and implements (web pages, software, applications), interacted with neighbors (in forums and groups) and mimicked certain characteristics of offline modes of communication, be it in individual expression, group behaviour, networking, conducting business or indulging in leisure.

As I see it, there is inevitability to this trajectory and the Web would one day need governance. What accelerated external imposition of monitoring and regulations were other accidental – and sometimes, deliberate – events that took place parallel to early net explorations. The first SPAM email was sent out on 3 May 1978; first “bootsector” virus Elk Cloner was released in 1981, affecting floppy disks; in 1984, William Gibson writes the book ‘Neuromancer’ and coins the term ‘cyberspace’, effectively distancing the net from the educational and scientific “classification” into the realm of pop-culture-science-fiction; by 1989 McAfee Associates were distributing free virus software.

It’s in the mid-1990s, with the increasing rivalry between business corporations Microsoft, IBM, CISCO, Apple and Sun that we also see the first government and legal interventions in the arena of cyberspace and net technologies.  Napster was created in 1999, incentivizing music sharing online and striking the matching of copyright and piracy wars. Also, in the same year, we experienced our first mass annihilation thrill with the Y2K scare, and the year following, the ‘dotcom busts‘ shook our bubble-grade faith in the invulnerability of the Web. In November 2001, The European Council adopts the first treaty addressing criminal offenses committed over the Internet.

So there you have it, our forays in cyberspace were never really about responsible discovery; criminality and juvenile behavior also went hand in hand. A simple example would be the annoying CAPTCHAs that we have to pass through before our comments can be made visible on a blog. If spammers didn’t have so much leverage online or the tools to hoodwink the system, we wouldn’t need such check points, no? The same goes for piracy, phishing, money laundering, cyber-stalking, unsolicited pornography, hacking and disruption of secure, functional websites, and a host of other criminal activities that can’t be ignored or clicked away to the Recycle Bin.

The timeline to our current state is provided not as a history lesson and neither is it an explanation for the governments of the world to continue with their policies, which have steadily entered the territory of human rights abuse. With increasing criminal activities online – and increasing complaints from common man – the governments of the world have found it easy to take charge and gain footholds into our personal and private spaces. We now know more about surveillance, it’s not just a piece of brilliant fiction out of George Orwell’s mind. Everything from phone calls, messages to emails are censored, collated, archived, studied and sometimes, stopped from being sent out. Bloggers have been jailed, digital activists have been killed, net services have been shut down and services to websites have been denied arbitrarily.

That moral high ground that I started off defending earlier has crumbled.  Now, there is a tightening circle that we are pigeon-holed into and I no longer look to the ‘chief’ to keep me safe. The chief is in cohorts with the toolman (the group that harnesses technology to make weapons and design our security systems), lulling us into thinking that we cannot do without them. The stage is set for a showdown between techno-politico groups on one hand and civic-non-governmental factions on the other; one trying to hem us within boundaries, the other constantly redefining the meaning of boundaries.

What gives you hope for a better cyber society? More difficult to answer, which side of the divide do you belong – the one that thrives in chaos or the one that seeks order? I am still toeing the line on this one.

As Pranesh Prakash puts it succinctly, “…too little regulation and you ensure that criminal activities are carried on with impunity; too much regulation and you curb the utility of the medium.” But who do you turn to when the law makers judge you guilty even before you commit a crime? I guess there’s no ‘one-solution-fits-all’ answer. What you can bet your last buck on is that for every argument there’s a counter-argument. The anarchist who wants a law-less society is pitted against someone who wants balance and regulation through open data, open government and open culture initiatives. The cynic who is fed up of governmental control is pitted against the rationalist who calls for policy consultation with citizen-led groups. The poet who laments about surveillance might find solace with the academic stalwarts, who believe dialogue is a better way to achieve our aims – freedom with balance – than taking up arms.

This post appears as the editorial for Volume 8 Issue 2 of Links In the Chain, an online newsletter circulated by Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore, as part of the  Digital Natives With a Cause? project. Download issue here.

- Nilofar Ansher

At the recently held Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles (July 10-14), the software megacorp announced “revolutionary” upgrades to its web search engine Bing in time for Christmas 2011. I watched the keynote videos and my jaw went slack with what Steve Ballmer was enumerating. With its tie-up with Skype, and subsequently with Facebook, the future of Bing search looked more like a mini-ecosystem, than a simple query software.

So, what will Bing allow users? Well, unlimited options to personalize the way they access information, news and entertainment. What it translates into is a theme park where visitors would never have to leave or visit a neighboring one as all their joyrides are made available in one space. Sounds good? Not to me. The future Bing would allow me to not just casually search for information about a stadium, but also allow me to search for upcoming events and games, check for seats and ticket availability and reserve parking space for my car on game night!

What megacorps are good at doing is provide a service that makes users dependent on it. There is no compulsion or brainwashing, neither is the product or service life-saving, but the convenience of use and the perks thrown in as side dishes to the service sure make it difficult for users to opt-out. Since when did a simple blank box make a bid to take over our web-engagement? In the near future, I would have no choice but to subscribe to a Bing or Google-like service to get my tickets booked or reserve space for my parking, else my neighbor and the larger public would beat me to the best seats.

A bigger concern for me would be security, privacy and who has rights to access and track my activities online. We lull ourselves into complacency when we are told that there are ‘bots’ and ‘machines’ and ‘engines’ who sift and filter information, not the all-seeing human eyes. This perception only helps perpetuating a myth about secure online transactions – and businesses and megacorps survive on the longevity of that myth. How else do they get more customers willing to share ever more amounts of information about their personal lives that will help a Microsoft or Google to cater to their needs?

Let’s rewind a bit. The evolution from search engine to a personalized ecosystem began with a blank box.

In the beginning: a blank box

Discovery and randomness defined how we browsed the net in the early-to-late-90s. We didn’t know the destination and neither did we have reference to many / specific webpages, and so we wandered about, landing up at the links that keywords took us to. Here, I talk about the ordinary home net user, not the geek or the techie who understood https, urls, browsers, algorithms and webpages. The intent was to simply read, learn and discover what was out there (well, certainly didn’t come across The Truth!).

We have come a long way from Lycos and Alta Vista. Did we even understand how browsers worked and why search engines are not synonymous with a Netscape, Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox! User interface has evolved and search engines are now in-built to a browser.  There’s less of discovery and more of specific destination travel. More of keyword searches for news and analysis, music videos and job searches than lazy discoveries that Google’s ‘Surprise Me’ allows – pancakes, Black Widow Spider, Russian folklore. This is how I progressed with my understanding of information access online.

Today, I am more choosy about the search engine I use – and the browser options for various tasks from seeking information, researching for work or live streaming entertainment shows. Experience shows me that Yahoo! and Bing searches yield specific results to a query – say censorship in China  -  compared to Google’s or Ask Jeeves. Let’s not forget that search results vary when we use keywords in combination with different characters and operators: “Censorship“+China | China+censorship (no quotes) | *censorship in China* | These are the most frequently used strings, but we also have the dollar symbol ($), the negative sign (-) that are considered aids to enhancing search queries, but really, end up fragmenting the outputs further for every user.

Something about an echo-chamber?

What conclusion am I to draw when I see a particular weblink is number one on Google’s search results, but ranks number eight on Bing’s? We are aware of paid ads, sponsored links, promoted content and the brains behind the algorithms that filter information for me. We also know that personalized searches are now a reality. So, if I am a news editor and Google keeps tracks of all the online publications I subscribe to, then it would also know exactly which search result to propel to the top 10 – and get corporations and advertisers a better vantage point to track their potential customer. Again, this is about perpetuating a business ecosystem, not about making my life convenient.

Do the variations concern me? Yes, as a matter of amateur research curiosity about how search engines create information silos for different geographic locations and net users. Since I use only Google Search, is my information tree mappable to others who search for similar keywords and work in the same profession. On the other hand, as a reader or consumer, will all Google users have one set of information about Censorship in China, where others would believe what they have read on Bing? Are search bots really the source of all web knowledge and filters? Why are machines more trustworthy than humans? Cyber-ethicist, especially, are concerned about the echo-chamber effects of being hemmed in by a search ecosystem that only shows us what we want to see through the use of personalized and customized search results.

It’s not about discovery anymore and much to do with brand loyalty. If you trust Google’s public image more than Microsoft’s, chances are you will have a Googlized way of looking at things; it’s not just Google’s search engine you access, but Google+, Android phones, cloud apps and other networking devices the company will release and connect to a Google ecosystem that we will be forced to use for its convenience. Can you imagine using an Apple iPhone with Android OS? Yes! Do you see that happening? No!

Time for a meta-search engine? Let’s call it…

The way search engines function, they are not liable to deliver the most accurate results. Webpage links are displayed based on “astronomically” complex calculations of page rank, number of visitors to a website, accurate title and url keywords, and of course, promoted content (which is highlighted as paid sponsorship). But how do you define a search? Is it merely a collection of various items sourced from different places? Of course not! Searches are very specific and must remain so for the purpose of authenticity. While Google and Bing don’t claim to be expert researchers – merely finders and aggregators of what their search bots are able to find – users have appropriated these search services as a mecca for accuracy and completeness. Accuracy of information today is – falsely – determined by the number of people who popularize a search engine and trust its results enough to use again and again. Credibility in effect, rests in the hands of corporations who are not liable by law or rules to caution users to not blindly trust all that the search engine collates for them.

This blog is not a rant against Google or Bing, and neither does it lament the foolishness of the information consumerist society that is just too lazy to look beyond the Top Five search result links of a search engine. But it upsets me to think that most of us get hoodwinked into trusting the products of a corporation merely because of a good User Interface and excellent marketing and in-your-face advertising. How about if we hold the search giants liable for the information their bots aggregate? How about we hold them accountable for turning up phishing, fraudulent or spam websites in their results? Isn’t un-asked for advertisements a breach of our privacy rights?

If each of the megacorps have resources to search over a billion webpages individually, imagine what would be at the disposal of users if all of them could combine their search algorithm for a Meta Search Engine? There would be no duplicity of information, no variations in data output, no geographic demarcations or cut-offs and no information silos generated within each community of users – just one meta search engine, which everyone can refer to, from any country, searchable and translatable in any language and media (audio, text, images, pages).  While we do have meta search sites that give aggregate the search results of the top four search giants, it once again comes down to the “best of the ability” of the able search bots.

This is also a signal for the legal teams – cyber regulators – to step in and start a citizen-led discussion on what should be the common minimum of expectations from a web service that every net user has come to rely on. If access to Internet is considered a basic human right, access to a trusted, credible and accurate search engine should also be part and parcel of that instrumental policy.

- Nilofar Ansher