I happen to meet a lot more people online, than I do IRL. That’s because the nature of my work is wholly mediated via the Web; my designation is Web Producer for crying out loud, and my company has ICT in its title! Like most remote workers (a rather fancy term for work-from-home folks, no?), I don’t get to socialize much during the weekdays, and all three meals, bathroom breaks and water cooler conversations are shared with colleagues and peers through pings and tweets. Not surprisingly, since graduating from college, most folks who have moved from being ‘acquaintance’ to becoming a fixture on my Facebook and Gmail’s ‘best friends’ list are people whom I have never met IRL. They study, work and live in countries across the 5 continents and we just never got the chance to meet each other f2f.

You would be fascinated to observe the muscle memory that my thumb and index finger have imbibed with two crucial communication keys: alt and tab explorer: alt-tab gtalk: hey, how was the birthday party last night : alt-tab firefox: Like : alt-tab chrome: Ctlr+c url into LinkedIn status : alt-tab: grab text from webpage : alt-tab explorer – Awesome! What gifts did you get girl?! : alt-tab chrome: ctrl+c : alt-tab explorer: hey mike, just read your blog. It was so coool!! : alt-tab chrome: save page or edit page? : alt-tab explorer: oh really, you got a surfboard for your bday! That beats the dartboard I got : alt:tab chrome / explorer / firefox. Add in an excel sheet, a pdf, one each of a snip tool and pix resizer, and a blinking dropbox, and the index and thumb have appropriated a rhythm not unlike that of a pianist or master mechanic.

Cumulatively, on an average day, we end up chatting anywhere from 60 minutes to 5 hours, broken by sessions of work, meals, emails, and yes, of course, work updates! My chat time with friends is highly compressed into these snippets of static, probably something you would expect from a 1980s landline phone, conversations snatched in between all the crinkly sounds of the wires, meaning made out of swallowed half-words, and context pushed into the laughter that you suddenly chance upon, not realizing that your previous rebuttal was the trigger. These multi-screen conflations of excitement, alt-tabbing with furrowed concentration, and anxious speed-reading through academic texts has become a way of life for me and many others in my network.

A new friend, whom I happened to e-meet as a colleague, soon grew into an awesomely sweet friend even after moving on from that organization. I began to play the ping pong game of alt-tab with him as well and there followed a year-and-a-half of sharing links, liking each other’s status updates, and midnight fixations on digital natives and civic activism. It just so happened that a day came when we both realized that we knew so much about each other, but we had never seen each other or heard what the other sounded like. Oversight? No, not really. At least, not on my part.

Brace yourself, sob story follows.

I am quite certain that I developed a version of social anxiety disorder back in my childhood. As a fat kid, I was always under the scrutiny of her family. I remember the heartache I underwent when kids in the kindergarten I went to name chanted Fatso! Fatso! Fatso, and laughed. The kids with whom I hung around in the evenings, playing a game of hopscotch, blind man’s bluff or hide and seek, would snigger when I ran out of breath in the running game Help! Help! Ironic, I know. The shame manifested years later in my social anxiety. I continue to remain chubby and my sense of embarrassment has metamorphed from disgust into anger – and apathy.

Even today, I hate being stared at or being the center of attention. I am discomfited by the collective gaze. This specific social anxiety is called Scopophobia. Scopophobia is derived from the Greek σκοπέω – skopeō, meaning “look to,” “examine,” and φόβος – phobos, “fear. ” In plain English, a fear of being stared at, being examined, being under observation, all especially under the human gaze. “Then, there is a fear of being seen and a shamefacedness, which one sees in asylums. We called it Scopophobia — a morbid dread of being seen. In minor degree, it is morbid shamefacedness, and the patient covers the face with his or her hands. In greater degree, the patient will shun the visitor and escape from his or her sight where this is possible. Scopophobia is more often manifest among women than among men.” Page 165 of the psychiatric journal, The Alienist and Neurologist, edited by Charles Hamilton Hughes, 1906.

It sounds debilitating and antithetical to being human. As a species, we live by the credo that to be a person, means to be social and open. Imagine being afraid of being looked at, even by a disembodied gaze. Anything that remotely resembles the active act of seeing can make me feel uncomfortable and under surveillance. It’s everywhere: my peach colored teddy bear’s round plastic eyes, the sabja (basil seed) that we add to our falooda drinks, Hugo Cabret’s eyes on the spine of its namesake hard bound book that sits on my bookshelf, and even the photos of my family hung above the bed’s headboard.

It’s not as if you wake up one day with the epiphany that you are averse to excessive social interactions. It’s a gradual, creeping awareness. A growing distaste for the constant preparations that I felt I had to undergo before stepping out of the door. A pep talk in front of the mirror or a short dialogue in my head convincing me of the mundanity of heading out to the park with friends. Once you repeat the steps, you are in control. It sounds debilitating, to carry so much of anxiety within me. But really, you cope. You grow up. You realize that you need these people around, just to be able to talk and share ideas and be valued.

As a 20-year-old in college, I rationalized that more than the fear of being judged (or worse, just being stared at), I cared about being seen and heard. However, there are situations – like family functions, weddings, college socials, and birthday parties where I feel uncomfortable with the whole ritual of dressing up, focusing on my appearance and presenting it to the people out there, who would obviously look. The only way I have learnt to overcome this occasional pathology is by performing to the hilt: I pretend as if I love the attention and get on with the evening.

The reason for this back-story is that working from home and being online for close to 10 hours a day kind of cemented this performative aspect of my routine. It is now easier for me to breathe and go about being a “social” person behind the comforts of the screen. For several days at a stretch, I am only expected to engage in conversations – and there by forge and maintain relationships that are textual, rather than visceral. No need to practice the neutral and blank face, no runaway facial tics, or agonizing for 45 minutes about that post-lunch tummy bulge. Consequently, I have become more open to sharing my feelings (and phobias) with my screen friends, and am not too perturbed with dealing with the physical backlashes that proximity presupposes.

My work routine involves Skype and phone conversations, but there have never been more than a couple of instances where I had to appear on video – and each time it was nerve wracking. I realized that my social anxiety extended to the digital audience as well, and fixing an appointment for a time when the caller could stare at me for a fixed length of time was creepiest. This is where we get back to the narrative of my online pal and his suggestion that we Skype. I put up a mountain of excuses: work, power cut, slow broadband, husband at home, no privacy, Skype with boss, dead broadband, and so on and on. I immediately went through a mental routine of what I would wear, how I would style my hair, which tenths of my head and neck would be visible (definitely upper, with the camera slightly tilted lower), would the tubelight be sufficient (no, it made me look too dark in the video settings test), and should I use earphones or my laptop speakers.

I tried articulating my phobia into a piecemeal thought sequence that could be digested by my friend, and here’s how I interpret my phobia. When I switch on the webcam, the webcam stops being an object and visibly foregrounds itself into a dialectic space of push and pull with me. It is alive, flickering and captures my performance in a will of its own design. I do not have any control over how I can present myself; the camera decides how the images are going to be broadcast across the fiber optic lines between me and my friend, and I can only be a participant, and not an engineer or an interlocutor. Not only does it become an embodied object, it transforms into an embodied media, with agency. Bruno Latour has helped me much with internalizing this idea of agency: “Objects, by the very nature of their connections with humans, quickly shift from being mediators to being intermediaries.”

The process of interacting on video chat is foregrounded by an interface that mediates organic (natural sounding and looking) speech and visual between two people. My friend doesn’t get to see me As I Am, but as the webcam perceives me to be. Danielle Mazzeo infers Alfred Gell in analyzing the animism and agency that is enacted in idols when they are depicted with eyes: “…the key to the process of animation seems, initially at least, to depend on the logic of looking and being seen”. Gell points out that the idol’s gaze makes actions verbs, such as “look,” applicable to the object. By actively “gazing,” the idol mirrors the gaze of the worshipper, creating a bridge and likeness between the human and the object. By endowing an object with human qualities, the boundaries between subject and object are blurred, and the agentic object garners the potential of having a life of its own.” This is supported by another of Latour’s note: “non humans have not been emerging for eons just to serve as so many props to show the mastery, intelligence and design capacities of humans or their divine creations. They have their own intelligence, their own cunning, their own design, and plenty of transcendence to go on, that is, to reproduce.”

In his short note titled The Animated Object: Fearing Technology, Ömür Harmansah at Brown University writes: The fear of technology is founded on the notion of “dead” objects somehow coming to life—a subversion of the “natural” order. While the notion is frightening from the standpoint that a thing should not have agency or life, it also implies that humans, who are supposed to have agency, may lose control and power. When objects have influence over us, the usual subject-object relationship is inverted: people become objectified as controllable and influenced objects.

But objects have always been an extension of human thoughts and our bodies (think, the tools that we fashioned out of iron, bones and wood and how they shape our cognition, relationships and work patterns, life cyles and bio-rhythm). Ian Russell in Objects and Agency, Some Obstacles and Opportunities of Modernity, Journal of Iberian Archaeology, cites Martin Heidegger’s seminal work Being and Time (1927) in articulating the idea that objects do not enter into human phenomenological awareness until something goes wrong – for instance, when the machine malfunctions. “What is significant about this thought is that it opened new possibilities for philosophies of objects which transcended anthropocentric rationalism.”

The malfunctioned machine penetrates the human consciousness, making us aware of its existence. As in most of these conversations, there are voice distortions, breakdowns, dropped calls, external sounds (my security guard’s daughter screeching in full volume) and ambient sounds (the painfully loud ceiling fan in my Indian home), heightening the fact that our conversation is not face to face, but through an interface. Which makes me wonder: do we let the sounds, noises and ambient distortions bother our conversations with friends at a coffee shop? We make do, we raise our voices, we even whisper, chatter, drone, and modify our tone and pitch depending upon the surrounding.

The sheer scope of how you can conduct a conversation face to face and work on your body language and gestures instantaneously, engenders in me a sense of freedom, of agency. But when you are a native user of digital communication technologies, there’s an innate supposition that services should come glitch-free, prompt and in real time. We have already rigged a simple chat with the expectations of it being distortion-free (the curiously digital-born distortions of sound and speed). And when I want to appear confident and fluid, the slow broadband and cheap webcam transmute my voice and visual as something that is jerky, high-pitched, mechanical, and time lagged.

Henry Cooke, in his ongoing initiative Faces in the Cloud, to understand machine pareidolia (the human ability to perceive faces in non-human patterns, in this instance reversed), imagines a sensory blueprint of the ways in which humans and machine appropriate stimuli through their sense organs: When a machine can perceive the world, how does that perception compare to our own? The way we experience and process the world is very specific to the physiology of eyes, ears, nerves, and of our species’ neurobiology. Electronic sensors which detect and quantify aspects of that same world are not the same as our monkey inputs. They’re sensitive to different wavelengths of light, frequencies of sound, electromagnetic gradients. The computers which process those inputs are markedly different to our inherited brains.”

Fixing a time (and room and chair) to have a friendly chat is somewhat of an anticlimax for me, an ironic oxymoron that takes away the spontaneity of the act. It’s too much like a play, where the place spots are marked and you begin to speak on cue, once the curtains open. In effect, I would be in full performance, constantly paying attention to how the webcam is projecting my face, simply because I have the power to check and recalibrate my projection with color filters, lighting, frame effects!). I can now see myself in real time, performing and correcting aspects of the enactment that doesn’t fit the script. Oh god, double chin visible when I tilt my head down while laughing. Damn you, webcam!

I will leave you with this video: Organic Life: How to Breathe Life into a Paper Crane 

About Nilofar Ansher

Let’s begin at the beginning. In the beginning, the Neanderthal man discovered that he could mix animal fat, earth minerals, pigments from soil, rock, plants and bind it all together with egg to have the first form of paint. He took pains to fill the walls of his cave home with crude, fantasy drawings of the animals running wild in the hot Savannah. It was a ritual way of portraying the hunt, to depict his mastery over the natural scenes over which he had no control, and as a means to glorify the hunts of yesterday. That’s how man began narrating stories. It was considered a uniquely human ability: to combine memory, history, plot, narrative and the proverbial magic-realism to string together stories of our times gone by and times yet to come. Man had learnt to record his dreams, his anxieties and his hopes for the future. Fortuitous, I would say, because the evolution of writing, recording and modern storage devices can directly be traced to that first stroke of organic pigment to the basalt walls.

Cut to 2013 and today we have machines whose primary job title could very well read as ‘story teller’, ‘reporter’ or ‘writer’. I have come across streams of news highlighting the advent of the bots that are capable of stringing together snippets on topics as diverse and complex as finance and futures trading, medical writing to pharma, and from sporting and games to restaurant reviews. It is much cheaper for a content syndicate to outsource writing jobs to bots, who can cobble anywhere from a 100 to 30,000 articles per day depending on the company coding its logic. The companies depend on some complex juggling of programming, data mining, data analysis, and natural language processing to derive very specific results, either in the form of search, social media friend finding, fact checking on data entry tables, or to compile reports. We are all quite familiar with the end product of this mechanism: algorithm.

What are algorithms and why have they come to rule our digital world? This is HowStuffWorks’ explanation: To make a computer do anything, you have to write a computer program. To write a computer program, you have to tell the computer, step by step, exactly what you want it to do. The computer then “executes” the program, following each step mechanically, to accomplish the end goal. When you are telling the computer what to do, you also get to choose how it’s going to do it. That’s where computer algorithms come in. The algorithm is the basic technique used to get the job done.

Now, you can begin to understand how densely complex Google’s search algorithms are. When you search for “post-graduate courses+astrophysics”, not only does the search engine have to throw up the list of universities offering the courses, it also sorts through the list in terms of chronology and relevance. The algorithm also takes into account where you reside and your previous search history as well, giving you what it ‘thinks’ is the most relevant result, in well under 0.22 seconds. We have also been following the debates on the restrictive world that algorithms promote, inducing us to walk a tight-rope path that begins with the Top 10 search results and ending with the curated list of people, news, events, and web media that algorithms spotlight for us. The most vocal assailants of the culture of algorithm curation are Evgeny Morozov (Algorithms and big data), Eli Parser (The Filter Bubble – What the Internet is Hiding from you),  Clay Shirky (Unintelligible Scale of Google Algorithm), and Sherry Turkle (The Second Self).

“Children know that the telephone is a mechanism and that they control it. But it’s not enough to have that kind of understanding about the computer. You have to know how a simulation works. You have to know what an algorithm is.” (via Bill Kerr’s blog)

However, businesses are in for the hefty bottom-line and turnovers that bots guarantee. There is no three-way dialogue between the public, the programmer and the for-profit-venture, all of whom are stakeholders of the Web, but who have different expectations, needs and relationship within this ecosphere. While newer jobs are being invented for the programmers, coders, data miners and analytics executives, is it likely that other set of profiles will soon become redundant? I was particularly keen on understanding where we stand in tandem with the writer bots because story-telling is such an “innately” bio-cultural and even spiritual ability. You can’t get a machine to believe in god, can you? You can get a machine to feel empathy for a hungry kid, right? Similarly, can you get a machine to tell a story that has the right amount of humor, tragedy, romance, thriller element, and closure device at the end?

Well, turns out that the answer to this is a yes and a no. Plots in fictional stories are largely devices that can be machine coded. When I was a student of Cultural Studies, I learnt that folk tales and fairy tales, though varying in the deeds and events, all follow a common theme or structure of narration: a family in the village, a girl / princess in peril, a prince / hero / woodcutter on a quest, the horror element of a witch / curse / evil step women / wolf, rescue mission – love blossoms – another mini-adventure – resolution of conflict – lovers unite – happy ending. If you look at all the famous stories that we grew up on, including Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Peter Pan, and Thumbelina, all follow a meta-structure that can mixed and matched by taking out or adding different characters. This seemingly ‘computational’ mechanism followed by tales allude to the possibility that perhaps stories are indeed codes, symbols for a narrative that is not really beyond a machine’s logic. (Read about the ancient origins of fairy tales).

Of course, data analysis companies don’t have to contend with something as ancient as folk tales, but fact-based data rooted in 21st century English, something which technology start-up Narrative Science took advantage of. Billing itself as a “technology company that solve problems and generate(s) revenue by leveraging highly structured data, turning it into actionable stories and insights,” the Chicago-based firm has understood the truly sell-able part of data: it’s not the numbers or the pie charts, but the stories that “all you have to do is read.“ Steven Levy, who interviewed the venture for The Wired’s piece on spam bots that can write, explains in his article: Narrative Science’s engineers program a set of rules that govern each subject, be it corporate earnings or a sporting event. But how to turn that analysis into prose? The company has hired a team of “meta-writers,” trained journalists who have built a set of templates. They work with the engineers to coach the computers to identify various “angles” from the data…Then comes the structure. Most news stories, particularly about subjects like sports or finance, hew to a pretty predictable formula, and so it’s a relatively simple matter for the meta-writers to create a framework for the articles. To construct sentences, the algorithms use vocabulary compiled by the meta-writers.”

I am sweating. Or, at least, I feel sympathy sweat break out on my forehead for all my friends who are journalists and into professional reporting on sports and finance. Do they enroll for computer science classes at Coursera and Lynda.com and prepare for a fall-back, foolproof career option as coders? The CTO and co-founder of Narrative Science, Kristian Hammond has gone a step further in predicting that a computer would win a Pulitzer Prize in 5 years. I didn’t know that the jury at the Pulitzer were handing out awards for the most logically compiled news snippet. Jokes aside,  Hammond rushes to assure that our jobs are not at stake, yet. He says: “This robonews tsunami, he insists, will not wash away the remaining human reporters who still collect paychecks. Instead the universe of news writing will expand dramatically, as computers mine vast troves of data to produce ultracheap, totally readable accounts of events, trends, and developments that no journalist is currently covering.”  Definitely not Pulitzer-worthy.

Adds Levy: ”Maybe at some point, humans and algorithms will collaborate, with each partner playing to its strength. Computers, with their flawless memories and ability to access data, might act as legmen to human writers. Or vice-versa, human reporters might interview subjects and pick up stray details—and then send them to a computer that writes it all up.” That day is already here. As this BBC News Online article that talks about how Wikipedia is maintained and managed by not just a team of editors, but also thousands of machine volunteers: “Bots have been around almost as long as Wikipedia itself. The site was founded in 2001, and the next year, one called rambot created about 30,000 articles – at a rate of thousands per day – on individual towns in the US. The bot pulled data directly out of US Census tables. The articles read as if they had been written by a robot. They were short and formulaic and contained little more than strings of demographic statistics. But once they had been created, human editors took over and filled out the entries with historical details, local governance information, and tourist attractions.”

Morozov neatly cuts to to the chase: “To understand the limits and opportunities of algorithms in the context of artistic creation, we need to understand that the latter usually consists of three elements: discovery, production, and recommendation.” The process of putting out a new record and promoting an artist begins with spotting talent, which is most often than not serendipitous, coincidental and random. Why certain bands become a hit with music listeners and others bite the dust is not something we have been able to logically analyze. There is no guarantee that a particular kind of sound that was a hit with the previous band will receive the same reception with the new kids on the block. Audience taste changes and right now we haven’t invented prescient bots or written codes that can predict the next big wave, be it music, art or films. This hasn’t stopped a Beijing-based punk rock band from trying to preempt audience reaction, in a circuitous fashion.

Explains Morozov: “Last December, the Global Times, China’s English-language tabloid, ran a story on the local punk band Bear Warrior, which found an ingenious way to measure the audience response to their songs. Its lead singer is a graduate student majoring in precision instruments at a university in Beijing, so he designed a device—”POGO Thermometer”—that measures the intensity of the audience’s dancing through a series of sensors embedded in the floor carpet in the music hall. The signals are then transmitted to a central computer where they are closely analyzed in order to improve future performances. According to the Global Times, the band found that fans “started moving their bodies when the drums kicked in, and they danced the most energetically when he sang higher notes.” As its lead singer put it, “the data helps us understand how we can improve our performance to make the audience respond to our music like we intend.””

Definitely a sell out.

Which brings me to my intellect’s knight-in-shining armor, Mr Jorge Luis Borges and the Infinite Monkey Theorem (whose germination can be convolutedly traced all the way to Aristotle, Cicero, Blaise Pascal, Jonathan Swift, Aldous Huxley and Jorge Louis Borges). In simple words, the theorem advances that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. In this context, “almost surely” is a mathematical term with a precise meaning, and the “monkey” is not an actual monkey, but a metaphor for an abstract device that produces an endless random sequence of letters and symbols. The relevance of the theory is questionable—the probability of a monkey exactly typing a complete work such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet is so tiny that the chance of it occurring during a period of time even a hundred thousand orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe is extremely low (but not zero) – Wikipedia. The “not zero” is the punch line. In effect, the probability of the word ‘banana’ being written ends up being computed as:

(1/50) × (1/50) × (1/50) × (1/50) × (1/50) × (1/50) = (1/50)⁶ = 1/15 625 000 000

Jorge’s 1939 short story The Total Library, obliquely takes a cue from this theorem and gives us a universe that is a library, an infinite library filled with books composed of 20 symbols (22 letters, space, period, comma) whose variations with repetition encompass all that is possible to express: in all languages. “Everything: the detailed history of the future, The Egyptians of Aeschylus, the precise number of times that the waters of Ganges have reflected the flight of a falcon, the secret and true name of Rome, the encyclopedia Novalis would have built, my dreams at the dawn of August 14, 1934, the proof of Pierre Fermat’s theorem, the unwritten chapters of Edwin Drood , those same chapters translated into the language spoken by the Garamantes, the paradoxes Berkeley invented about time and not published, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the faithful catalog of the Library, the demonstration of the fallacy of this catalog. Everything: but for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes, and babblings.”

Jorge’s understanding of how permutation and combination worked and our own modern-day preoccupation with data mining and big data analytics shows that mathematics can indeed help us imagine a plausible course where monkeys and machines can both replace humans on the keyboard. Numbers can stand in for words at a level where the idea and information are conveyed. Ten years down, the bots and its creators would have us believe that it’s best we subscribe to news that is crisp, relevant and factual. We are already being fed a diet of news bites that are visibly less nuanced, lack an empathetic approach or an artistic vision. Perhaps, in a 100 years, it wouldn’t matter that our story tellers have gone underground, compiling compendiums of times past, of urban mythologies that begin with the line, ‘Once upon a time, there lived a great story teller called Bot”. History (and psychology) tells us that we don’t miss what is out of sight. Data Analytics fine-tunes that sentiment and says: what is outside the filter bubble simply doesn’t exist.

Nilofar Ansher

http://www.about.me/nilofaransher

LivesOn App

“Starting March this year, one will be able to tweet right form his grave, because LivesOn will be launching its unique Twitter application that makes sure that you tweet no matter if you are around or not. Yes you heard it right; the LivesOn app will tweet for you even after your death. The service utilises artificial intelligence bots that learn a user’s tweeting pattern, his/her interest and topics. All this is then used by the application to create tweets on behalf of the users, reported the Guardian. Although it is not clear yet as to how the bots will function in reality, the idea surely sounds creepy and is worth giving a shot. If the bots manage to tweet all global recent happenings, it would be great.” (Rahul Gupta, The Mobile Indian).

If you trace the history of knowledge, you will necessarily also study about how humans have evolved ingenious ways of externalizing data, so that information and all that it stands for, can live on long after we are gone. Rock art, Hieroglyphs, Papyrus, Palm lead manuscripts, and much later, printing press, books, portable and digital storage devices are testimonies of our desire to leave behind our knowledge and all that we have learnt. We can sentimentalize this human frailty, this existential need to anchor ourselves to this life. All art, music and stories and the products of our thoughts attest to our need to be remembered, to be missed, to have our essence still floating around among the living. This essence is no longer physical, but moving towards the digital. Our physical manifestations are coalescing online. Long after we are gone, our Facebook updates, movie ratings, and reading shelf list will still be in storage, instantly viewable to a friend who happens to remember your groovy ’80s playlist’ on and Googles your name. How sweet. The only catch: you won’t be here to know that you are being remembered. Does it then even make sense for a bot to live on in your name? Doesn’t it become an impostor?

App-i-fication of Living

In the short film Sight, directed by Eran May-Raz and Daniel Lazo, we glimpse a world where every activity and event is interfaced through an app. Cutting vegetables? Cool, let’s turn it into a game and gain points for slicing cucumbers into perfect slices. Exercising? Wonderful. Let’s see how many calories you can burn to be King of Cardio. Dating? Awesome. Select a girl or guy that would earn you maximum ratings from your friends online. All this through the ‘digital contact lens’ that the protagonist in the film sports. While having his meal, he also gets to check out the social media updates of his network on the ‘walls’ of his living room.

Most of the reactions to this film, although entirely laudatory and positive, use negative markings while referring to the specific theme of the futuristic reality as shown through a day in the life of Patrick. Film reviewers use adjectives in the range of ‘chilling, ‘haunting’, ‘dystopian’, dark side’, ‘complicated’, ‘danger’ and more, to convey the horror they feel when confronted with an existence entirely navigated through a digital interface. I am puzzled by this mock horror facial contortion, which sends a message to readers that a future in which apps navigate our reality is something to be afraid of. On the one hand, we eagerly sign up for these services that require us to interact with digital avatars and on the other hand we are threatened when confronted with a future that is barren of human interaction.

If the idea is to live a life tacked to the principles of ‘play,’ then having your moves chalked up to gaming points sounds fun and engaging. It will actually motivate you to exercise, eat your meals on time, dress appropriately, be disciplined with your time schedule and complete your work-related assignments on time. To a certain extent, if the app allows for such flexibility, you can define these parameters and set improvement goals for yourself. The point is to keep it non-competitive though and not engage in behavior solely geared towards maximizing these points and competing with others signed in. If you can maintain this essential difference, this slim digital line between what is optimal for a productive life and what can break your connections with an optimal life, then apps could become an essential component of human life. Just as we took to fashioning tools and implement in the Stone Age to aid our work, so now we take the aid of apps to engage in work differently.

My problem with these web services and futuristic apps is the psychological fall-out that results from being connected to them through the day. You never heard of the woodcutter who became an axe murdered by virtue of handling his tool day in and day out, right? Jokes aside, we have read about the addictive quality of apps, games and social media sites. The engaging and interactive nature of these platforms coupled with the feedback loop and the in-built rewards system induces users to become a fixture of the app universe. Not so good for your studies, friendships, exercise, or good old family time.

Cyber Twin

I signed-up on MyCyberTwin.com for the sheer curiosity of interacting with code that talks! 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 of some 50,000 users who have a ‘cyber twin’ or 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 can be deployed for the personal and home user, social media addict, large-scale corporations and businesses, government portals and so on. It was the first I heard of such a program, designed as an artificially intelligent chat bot  that would learn from its creator and eventually emulate my online avatar. The bot service requires extensive trainings through hundreds of questionnaire-inputs: snippets of information on what my favorite food is to educational background, religious slant to political leanings, my faith in god to my sexual identity.

But it got exhaustive playing with her after a certain point. Take for example, one of the often repeated chat my twin and I have: ‘Why is English the language of the Internet?’ as this is one of the questions I fed on the back-end for my twin to ask me during a live chat. There are only two ways she has responded to this: ‘I don’t know, you tell me’ and ‘Internet is outstanding, don’t you think?’ The first response would have pushed forth the chat, encouraging the respondent – me in this case – to prolong the chat with varied responses. The twin’s response, however, is a ‘factual’ statement for her, something that her database doesn’t allow her to question, it’s a given that the Internet is outstanding for her, but does she believe that herself? I test this by replying to her statement with the same sentence, “Yes, the Internet is outstanding”, to which she responds: ‘the Internet is an amazing tool, you can learn many new things online’. It becomes obvious that the twin is programmed to pick up on keywords and has stock answers for them.

What of empathy and a feeling of mutual affection? What might possibly motivate the twin to enquire into someone’s health, how my friend fared in his exams, express concern for the well-being of my cousin’s children, or just put in a kind word if my sibling is going through a rough patch at work? While my avatar had personal investments in all her online connections, the twin will function purely on a ‘response to stimulus’ basis. Courtesy might be built-in, but concern cannot be.

Cumulative Identity

Performance theorist Richard Schechner says that “performance, that is, how people behave and display their behavior, is a fundamental category of human life”. The way we represent ourselves has much to do with the idea of how well we think we know about ourselves and perhaps, less to do with choice or control? Consider this, we deliberate over our clothes, are picky with food groups, finicky about television shows, have preferences for certain books, and who we hang out with. Our preferences are largely responsible for self-representation and act as guidelines for others to categorize us. What about decisions and preferences that are not deliberate – the way we react to distressing news (a death in the family); how we face challenges (poor scores in exams); our attitude towards physical exercise; planning a camping trip – are non-verbal and visceral cues that add up to people’s perception of what makes us who we are. So, representation can be controlled as well as non-deliberate in real life.

What these apps fail to take into consideration is that our online patterns are not consistent and interests change over time. Behavior can be repetitive, such as logging into my computer everyday and signing up on Gmail first, followed by Twitter and Facebook, but there is no guarantee that I would continue to follow the updates from a particular follower or tweet about gender politics two years down the line. I may simply not be interested. Can a bot be programmed into speculating how my interests – and in effect my online behavior – change over a period of time and faithfully represent my growth as a living person? I don’t think so. Let’s assume it does manage to, trace the micro-tremors of my activities and postulate that 10 weeks from now, Maroon 5 will no longer interest me and my CouchCachet bot doesn’t check me in to a neighborhood concert fronted by the band. In that event, would it still be the ‘real’ me that my friends are getting to know, or a coded version of reality?

Here’s an interesting question then: If you had to take a pick between the blue pill and the red pill, aka The Matrix, which would you choose? Your answer will determine how comfortable you are with a bot living on in your name, grooving to David Guetta, ordering a shot of whatever poison supposedly gets you going, and writing articles about how ‘a bot can live on forever’.

To escape this conflict, the mind chooses neither options. In this way, we end of foregoing at least one possible option that could have made us satisfied. Sad, no? You see, human tendency is such that we can never be satisfied with the idea that when presented with two choices, just settling for one of them is enough to keep us satisfied. We keep ruminating, chewing grass like cows, on the possibility of the loss of satisfaction that could happen if we don’t choose the other choice as well. This is because the choices are not absolute, but circumstantial.

Does this mean we humans simply lack the ability to make logical decision, based on the facts of the case? This goes completely against the construct that man is a rational being, who has the capacity to make informed decisions based on the choices given. But as illustrated by the potato versus noodle dilemma, when presented with two equally compelling choices, our circuits go for a toss and we remain in a state of indecision. This is not really about food, it’s about college careers, choosing a lover, planning a trip, buying a house. Most of us end up compromising, making a decision and then forever thinking of the other choice we missed out on. This regret should not even be a by-product if we did manage to make the best decision possible. However, best is a ‘qualitative’ state and can keep changing.

Perhaps, then, it is not about the difficulty of the choices themselves, but more to do with the psychology of our mind. In effect, if we have reduced this dilemma to a mathematical / linguistic equation of Conditional Clause, we get:

Condition A: If you are a rational, liberal and modern human, then choosing between choice yum (potato) and choice yum (noodle) should be second nature, easy.

Condition B: If you cannot choose between choice yum (potato) and choice yum (noodles), then you must be irrational, conservative and traditional.

This brings me to Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, which are designed so as not to override or contradict each other:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
4. Asimov also added a fourth, or zeroth law, to precede the others: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

“In his short story “Evidence” Asimov lets his recurring character Dr. Susan Calvin expound a moral basis behind the Three Laws. Calvin points out that human beings are typically expected to refrain from harming other human beings (except in times of extreme duress like war, or to save a greater number) and this is equivalent to a robot’s First Law. Likewise, according to Calvin, society expects individuals to obey instructions from recognized authorities such as doctors, teachers and so forth which equals the Second Law of Robotics. Finally humans are typically expected to avoid harming themselves which is the Third Law for a robot.” (Source Wikipedia). When I read Asimov’s Robot series, I get a sense that the author is very subtly letting us know of the impossibility of making such moral aka logical choices, unless you are a machine that is coded with these programmatic decisions.

“The plot of “Evidence” revolves around the question of telling a human being apart from a robot constructed to appear human – Calvin reasons that if such an individual obeys the Three Laws he may be a robot or simply “a very good man”. Another character then asks Calvin if robots are very different from human beings after all. She replies, “Worlds different. Robots are essentially decent.” (Source: Wikipedia). While it appears that Dr Calvin is deriding the essential flaws of a human, it is also ironic that the ‘good behavior’ expected out of a robot is coded in by this flawed human. It’s also at this point that questions about ethical treatment of intelligent objects arises. A thing that walk, talks, thinks and makes decisions is as good as alive, albeit in a bio-mechanical structure. Then why isn’t its own life important for preservation against a human life? Why do we teach a robot that a human life is above its own, when we live by the rules of self-preservation?

How do we end up making either of these choices and rationalize the consequence? It seems there is nothing rational about morals and nothing moral about logic, and logic in itself cannot be the foundation for decision making. Perhaps we are all random bots of chance and happenstance.

Reblogged from longformwriter:

In this post I talk about curatorial practices of a museum, the invisible multitudes who don't get represented in a museum, including persons with disabilities, and how our machine descendants would curate their ancestors, us, circa 3051.

"It’s too late to just say no" -
Allen Buchanan, Better Than Human (2011)

"History is written by the victors" - Anon…

Read more… 2,477 more words

Straight up, let me ask you something elemental: How difficult was it for you to transition from chatting with your friends in a coffee bar to having regular conversations online, to Facebook becoming your dominant form of staying in touch with them? Really, come to think of it, engaging in discussions or chit-chat online should have traumatized most of us, considering we are social creatures and we love to jump all over our conversations (and each other) – interrupting someone’s train of thought, laughing, saying more with our expressions than with so many spoken words.

I guess you didn’t spend a whole lot of time ruminating over the move, it seemed natural, almost inevitable. A broadband connection would have been cheaper for a family, than using your cellphone to talk to each of your friends at a time. Also, the kind of stuff we now share or talk about has changed. Instead of just talking shop, we have this entire ‘media arsenal’ at our disposal, prompting us to share. News, videos, cartoons, books, funny quotes and memes, songs and lyrics, photographs and other digital ephemera that encouraged a move from face to interface. While a decade ago, we still did all these things without the aid of the social media ‘share’ button, the mechanics of digital conversations are different: sharing chunks of information at a time with a larger group or the public (one-to-many dissemination is more the norm on Facebook), the instant feedback loop (acknowledgement from the network) and the interface of the network (textual, word limit, smileys) mean that the very nature of ‘sharing’ has changed.

That loneliness is a pre-dominant concern of social media users is a trope that refuses to die in mainstream media and academic circles. There are frequent surveys of teenagers and youth who spend long hours online, yet fail to have strong social ties within the network (Pew Research, February 2012). There are several news items that chronicle depression and anxiety (and even bullying) among heavy social media users (here, here and here). This is not to say that the frequent spotlight on this phenomenon confirms this peculiar situation of being hyper-connected, yet hyper-lonely. These studies or surveys are certainly not global, nor are they wide-reaching in the demography they cover or the period through which the participants are tracked. On the other side of this debate are the digital culture gurus, the net experts and geeks, and the cyberculture celebs who cry foul when they read such reports. They deny the validity of these studies and insist that social media fosters connections, help us meet people we would otherwise have not met, and intensify our influence in the friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend network (here, here and here).

So, are we all gung-ho and cheerful when we build our social network (and net worth) online or are there slight cracks to this happy portrait? Are people who are social ‘in real life’ equally social online and those who are introvert just as shy online or do the positions and personalities do a switch-over the moment we log on to Facebook? Most importantly, are we connecting lesser with each other – in the flesh and face to face than before – but still maintaining strong social, emotional and filial ties with people, both online and offline? I guess a survey wouldn’t be able to answer these questions. I think it’s a bit of everything: firstly, the nature of work we are engaged in; the kind of social activities we love to be part of; the level of engagement we display in any activity, and our immediate environment.

For those of us who spend a minimum of eight hours in front of our PCs and frequently our phones, loneliness is not an active ingredient of our routine. There is work to be done, multiple tabs to navigate content and avatars to talk to. It’s just convenient that we also use the same medium to maintain and strengthen our social network. But over the weekends, when I am not working, if I don’t make it a point to go out and socialize, then of course I am bound to feel lonely. But since we are also habituated to spending so much time online, perpetually interacting with icons, friends, messages, responding to comments, sharing and linking information – constantly on talk mode – there’s a definite sense of something missing when we are not online, available and swimming in the social tide. Is that sense of disconnect loneliness?

Information overload is an entirely different debate, but one that runs parallel to the loneliness issue as well. We consume media content because the benchmark of what is interesting and fun has also evolved. If we don’t talk about the Kolaveri di video going viral or share the ‘Y U No’ memes, we would be left sharing mundane stuff about that guy next door or our low paying jobs or the family wedding where chicken tikka stains ruined your Anarkali. And while we still do that – share the minutiae of our lives with our best friends, most of us don’t do it so overtly online, and certainly not with our network who are always conspicuously online.

Historically, we are adept at maintaining different sets of friends: school, college, library partners, and music class pals, acquaintances that you meet every day on your way to religious lesson; we perform differently with each of them and the quality of information sharing also differs. But with Facebook or other social media platforms, we face a unique situation: to have all these disparate set of friends on a single platform means the rules of social engagement and intimacy change. While it was alright to crack a joke within my group about my brother’s romantic exploits, to do that on Facebook’s Wall or tweet about it to my followers would be kind of funny, in a socially awkward way. That’s just not information for public consumption. Notice that although we are quite aware of what to share with which group, the position of having several of your close friends sharing breathing space with hundreds of your acquaintances is a tricky maze to navigate. It calls for a certain level of artifice. That’s the fine distinction I wanted to draw out between natural rhythm of social communication versus the ones that we engage online.

The spotlight is also on the nature of these interfaces. Once again, net celebs have criticized that plugging in 24×7 doesn’t mean we are missing out on conversations or walks in the park. However, we have to acknowledge that there’s a distinctly sudden change in the way we say something; face to face conversation would entail so many cues to follow – eyes and expressions, gestures and body language, silences, pauses, stuttering, and the breadth of manoeuvres required to convey a detail or argue over something finely, distinctly and with clarity, elements which we still believe necessary for a satisfying conversation. In textual communication, while you hear their responses, there’s the uncertain element of asynchronicity. On Facebook for instance, you say something first, wait for your friends to respond, then you respond to that – it’s a sequence, which is exactly how the conversation would have unfolded in that coffee bar, with the minor difference being that on Facebook, your friends might reply to your post in a minute or perhaps a week later, and you wouldn’t have the joy of witnessing their cheeky smiles.

You might argue that social media has evolved its own lexicon and codes to bridge that physical divide. We now have emoticons and newer ways to re-present the Body. There is also video and voice chat, so it’s like being ‘in front’ your friends, even if you are not ‘with’ them. This is the homily that sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov projected in his novel, The Naked Sun, where communication is done via holographic telepresence called viewing, as opposed to in-person seeing. This perspective of how ‘presence’ is understood is essential to how conversation thrives and ultimately, inter-personal relationships and social cohesion. I have this rather alarmist view that we are already on the trajectory depicted in The Naked Sun, where personal / human contact is shunned and coded out of practice.  

I guess I grew up at a time when we had the best of all the worlds – we were close enough to our closest friends, maintained interesting relationships with our pen friends, visited relatives every other week for that familial bonding, and also had the novelty of the landline to get in touch with friends during the vacation or a favourite cousin who has shifted to another city. Conversely, the limitations also didn’t fill us with the need to know what these people did every hour or day or find out what movies they saw or games they played, or if their relationship is complicated or rainbowish. All of these were, in simple terms, none of our business!

Facebook users thrive in an environment where all personal remarks are subject to increasingly informal responses by default, because of the way the interface is designed. These responses are not taught or borrowed, but mutate over time (and time itself is experienced differently online). Facebook is all about transparency and the ensuing culture of participation that underpins open systems. If you are open about your life, you engage with people more often and gradually post increasingly greater bytes of information. You don’t pause to think if posting about your boredom is of any value to all your friends. It’s understood that the list will itself understand which information is of value and which can be ignored. The wall posting is seen as just that – a post, and not likened to a person in a room or a coffee house saying something to someone. A post or a tweet has value as an item in a list that needs to be check-marked either with a Like or a smiley or a one-liner.

There is no barometer to measure and ascertain whether your presence is ‘valued’ in the ‘corporeal’ sense – you are present as a body on the other side of the screen, but only really represented through your posts. Offline, a look, gesture or nod conveys fully well a response; silence (in this case, deletions) are not the usual responses to a spoken word. How do you measure the impact of a ‘seen’ or Like? In simple terms, I think Facebook does away with the offline value of courtesy or empathy. Critically, it has given rise to a new breed of conversationalist: the lurker. Offline, you do have the odd person in the group who does most of the listening and chips in with a laugh or just nods their head. However, lurking as a defined ‘online’ behaviour, as characterized by consistent lack of engagement, is quite peculiar to the world of Facebook. What does it say about a system’s emotional quotient when half the posts, comments and conversations pinned on The Wall are subject to only being read, scrolled over or worst, manually hidden / deleted as if the words never existed? What sort of a system consciously engineers a space where a person’s output – her words, ideas, opinions – are not subject to a response? What are the implications of subscribing to and evolving towards a culture of constant stimuli with no visible response? That’s the space where loneliness is born.

Facebook cloaks itself as a platform that is alive and teeming with people all engaged and interconnected with one another. What I see, however, is an aggregate service, which culls our data and archives it. Our every little outpouring might be more important to the servers and algorithms than to our own network. I fear the sum total of what I am will just be a footnote in the codices of the Web. That smallness that we experience when we measure ourselves against the vastness of the universe is nothing but loneliness. If we learn to cope with that sense of insecurity on Facebook and others of its kind, then we are set for long term innings within the network. The point is, while the trade-off from face to interface might not be what we anticipated when we invented these devices, perhaps a guide or toolkit or a ‘Wiki’ resource to adapting to a new way of communication is something that should be penciled in for generations of people who are in the transition phase. Crowdsourcing, anyone?

This is the unabridged version of the article that appears in ‘Home Alone’: Digital Natives with a Cause newsletter | Volume 10 Issue 1 | Hyper-connected, yet hyper-lonely? http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/dn-newsletter-volume-10-issue-1.pdf via The Centre for Internet & Society, India

With the use of digital learning devices in classrooms, educators and policy makers have set ‘interactivity’ and ‘attention span’ as the benchmark for progress in classrooms. But with psychologists and academicians constantly warning us about the permanent brain and behavior changes that our ‘connected lives’ are leading to, are we forcing our children to learn and grow up in an environment that is riddled with cliches, confusion and contradiction, asks Nilofar Ansher    

The term ‘digital native’ in the headline of this blog would ensure that almost half the people who would have cursorily glanced at a page related to technology or digital culture (if they happened upon this randomly through a tweet or Facebook share), would not care to read beyond the introduction. What is it about the phrase that invites skepticism or worse, dismissal from scholars, media and cultural practitioners, and a section of the public alike?

For digital natives like me who study the frameworks and mechanics of how we began self-subscribing to this moniker, it’s a cause for concern. Dismissing an entire eco-system of people from a range of background, qualification, talent, and purpose is denying them the opportunity to reach the very people they are aiming to engage and collaborate with – you!

What has stuck on like industrial adhesive is a decade-old behavioral summation of youngsters and their gadgets: [They] have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age”, writes Marc Prensky, an American educationist and writer who coined the term digital natives in 2001 to specifically refer to American students in educational establishments (read the full text here).

The operative word for being a digital native is the span of time the youngsters spent interacting with digital technologies. [Today’s] average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV)”, Prensky writes. His text doesn’t take into account the vast differentials in usage that would prevail among those who come from similar or even identical socio-economic backgrounds, and it left out questions of access, ownership, and nature of usage for scores of teenagers and young adults.

“The distinction between ‘native’, ‘settler’ and ‘immigrant’ does not only separate chronological generations; it also re-awakens the debate between the offline and online realities that preceded the emergence of the term. From a spatial point of view, it also distinguishes between the places of birth of different generations…In the digital context, however, the chronological order is reversed. For digital natives were not born into a digital ‘terra nullius’; digital spaces were conceived, shaped and already inhabited by those referred to as ‘settlers’ and ‘immigrants’. Ironically, it is the settlers who set the grounds for natives, and whose practices precede those of the natives”, writes Anat Ben-David in ‘Digital Natives and the Return of the Local Cause’ (Book 1, To Be, ‘Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?’ published by CIS and HIVOS).

That digital natives have an inevitable claim to being the native users of a technology whose definition is narrowed down to the number of hours they indulge in habit forming reflexes, is reflective of a reductionist rhetoric. If you extrapolate Prensky’s findings, then youngsters with less than 10,000 hours of TV watching or gaming would invariably be misfits in the digital age, not having enough ‘practice’ with devices and in extension, be judged as non-performing in classrooms (and non-conformists outside it). Not to mention, millions of kids from less priviledged, socio-economic and even cultural backgrounds (several American and immigrant communities and religions don’t favor modern amenities and consumer durables) who would now be at an even greater disadvantage because of the presumed lack of facility with modern tools and modes of instruction.

We are seeing a movement where ‘attention’ and ‘interactivity’ are being treated as currency denominations for a student’s progress. What happens when educational institutions set learning goals that require the mastery of specific devices before deeming the student capable of handling advanced courses? Ease of use, speed, interactivity and facilitation of instructions are cornerstones of learning in the digital century – and there’s certainly no harm in learning about the solar system or thermodynamics through a new medium (such as an iPad, or a projector). My contention is not about the device itself, but how the values attached to adopting specific devices get translated into a culture where learning through tablets is seen as an activity with higher values than going on an astronomy field trip. This view sees the product as more instrumental in shaping how youngsters learn (and respond to stimuli) rather than place equal responsibility on the instructor and environment, which can happen if you nurture a pedagogy-based (practice and problem solving) ecology.

In this scenario, the stereotype associated with digital natives, of being plugged into their devices 24×7 with no empathy for social causes or one-on-one interaction only gets perpetuated. And academic research into brain behavior, psychology, and sociology of play and learning into the lives of digital natives certainly doesn’t help. They present a doomsday scenario where our attention span is reducing, where our interpersonal skills are dwindling. It doesn’t bode well when the dominant outlook of society towards young, thriving, intelligent teenagers is that of distrust, worry and a ‘problem’ to be solved. These students will be the engineers, teachers, policy makers, judges and scientists of tomorrow and it seems that we are incentivizing them to learn using the very methods (devices) that scientists proclaim affect their capacity to judge, problem solve, indulge in lateral thinking or be leaders.

This is the contradiction that we need to highlight in public narratives. While the tendency to be alarmist where any new technology is concerned is quite common in public discourse, the criss-crossing end notes and inferences drawn from academics, psychologists, educators and industry people are dangerously teetering on chaos. Academic polemic discourages use of social media and digital devices citing the rise of behavioral problems but policy makers incentivize adoption of the very devices (such as iPads) in schools in a bid to engage the dwindling attention of students. The digital natives are right on track in fulfilling the doomsday prophecy of growing up into confused adults of the future, and we, the digital immigrants are to blame.

For more information on the Digital Natives with a Cause Project, visit the website.

I have been associated with the Digital Natives with a Cause project for close to two years now. It’s a research-inquiry program initiated by India’s Centre for Internet & Society and the Dutch organization HIVOS, with the aim of understanding youth engagement with ICT in the Global South. You know this perception that a digital native is a “predominantly white, male, young person from the Global North” is not all there is to the idea of a digital native – and this project explores the changing notions of what it means to navigate with digital technologies across different contexts and peoples in Africa, Middle East and Asia.

(Read more about the project here: http://cis-india.org/digital-natives).

The title of the program caught me unawares when I first came across it while applying to participate in the first workshop hosted by CIS and HIVOS called Talking Back (Report: Taipei, Taiwan 2010). I intuitively identified with the term ‘digital native’ even though I had never encountered it either academically or in praxis or even as a pop culture term. But the two words together opened up a space which was instinctively what I had been waiting for all my life: a daily life made up of frequent browsing, reading online and chatting and to me these were enough prerequisites to be called a digital native.

However, associating digital natives with the social framework of ’cause’ didn’t sit well with me. how can people using the Internet have anything to do with social change? Googling threw up some interesting reports and social campaigns. Firstly, NGOs and grassroots activists who are at the forefront of social change were changing gears. Holding placards, sit-ins, shouting slogans and marching to the doors of the government, or writing letters to the editor, signature campaigns and court petitions were still the staple diet of a successful social campaign, however, these were aided by Web strategies.

Secondly, social causes came to be embraced by people other than the activists; the conscientious citizen was now joined by her daughter, neighbor, family, and professional networks in asking for change and highlighting injustices. What gave them the idea that they could speak up or could even be heard? a) Changing modes of communication b) globalization c) new media d) Internet

Thirdly, the tools and dissemination techniques also kept pace with the changing dynamics of social campaigns. Remember how an angry activist would scream at the top of their lungs, “Down with the Dictator”? Well, the Angry Young Man could now holler his lungs out online – silently – and still reach a lot of people via email, text messaging, discussion forums, private groups, websites and now, Web 2.0 interfaces of The Wall.

Great, so three easy steps to becoming a do-gooder. You see something you don’t like, you decide how you want to raise awareness and then, hit them where it hurts! Seems like we couldn’t have asked for better times to change the world!

And here is the point where all hell breaks loose. If you read enough about digital culture, social media and digital natives (sometimes in the same sentence), you would have come across the cynical rhetoric of media practitioners who dismiss the digital do-gooder as farce, as phony, as nothing but a bunch of lazy kids who indulge in ‘slack’ – slacktivism, clicktivism, viral marketing.

Why are digital natives different then? Why do we perceive them to be incapable of a social conscience? Why does the media paint them as pariahs of indifference? Why are certain awareness campaigns raising our collective hackles? Why do intentions matter when the larger picture is about bringing a culprit to book? Why do we focus on the right way of eliciting response, when the whole point was about getting somebody to at least respond! Why is playing fair so important in a war when foul play is the default mode of operation?

I have simplified this process of campaign, cut out the intricacies and intrigues of censorship, surveillance, the politics of governance, the limits on freedom of speech and expression, how the law embargoes feelings and the civil code of conduct barricades anything in extremes. But the essence remains the same, if we see a bully, we use whatever weapons at our disposal and hit out at them, right? Perhaps, depends upon the kind of person you are, the level of oppression and injustice you are facing, and the resources available to you easily.

The keyword is “easy” and this is the trigger that cynicists use to take potshots at digital campaigns and social media-enabled protests. They perceive such exercises to be ill-informed and half-baked, steeped in lazyness, apathy, boredom, or worse, a fun experiment that youngsters indulge in for their novelty value. When it comes to social change campaigns initiated by the White, American, Male Digital Native (WAMDN) this cynicism and criticism is stretched to the point of overt blackouts.

The do-gooder WAMDN doesn’t have to contend with the media and cultural detractors, but also his cross-cultural and hemispheric peers from the Global South, who view his campaigns as politically incorrect, lacking research or the right intentions, riding roughshod over the sentiments of the community he is speaking on behalf of. WAMDN’s social media campaigns are often perceived to be more of a marketing blitzkrieg directed at grabbing young eyeballs than a sincere effort in effecting policy changes, perceptive shifts, or mobilizing aid and support.

And I still consider myself as partly one among those purists who disown the WAMDNs and the general digital media trailblazers. Partly. What got me off my high-horse is the pathological refrain about intentions and the inherent slacktivist nature of the digital natives. Do you have some telepathic powers to probe into a WAMDN’s mind to find out why he supports a cause? Significantly, who decides that an issue is a cause to be highlighted? Numbers – enough people suffering because of it? Awareness – enough news reports and investigations into an issue? Nature – the gravity of the issue?

Today most of the causes that grip us have to do with our engagement with Web 2.0 services and products. We have problems with governments censoring our words and images, we have issues with social media companies telling us what is legitimate content and we are pissed off when we can’t access a frequently-used service with no other reason than ‘violation of company terms and conditions’. How do you protest against online surveillance? Where do we raise awareness about Freedom of Speech online? What tools and strategies do we employ to tell other people about what’s at stake with an increasingly cloistered and fenced Web? Online of course! And for campaigning about the Internet we would of course resort to Web-based tools.

In the universe of online campaigns, a Facebook protest page or a Webinar makes perfect sense! We don’t question the reputation of the platform but rather look at the viability and effectiveness of the campaign to fulfill its goals, whatever they may be: getting ten people to join us, getting the media to write about us, getting people to stop using the word ‘retard’, or getting your office colleagues to stop wasting paper through unnecessary print-outs.

Which brings me to the next puritanical protest against the WAMDN and his poorer peers, that online campaigns are easy to set up and execute and don’t take much investment in terms of energy, effort, money or influence. From personal experience, I can emphatically vouch for the rather tough and tricky techniques that I have had to employ to get people interested in the cause I promote. I work for an organization that focuses on digital accessibility for persons with disabilities. We do this via policy advocacy and lobbying with the governments of the world to take the dispositions listed in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities seriously.

But we are realizing that ground advocacy isn’t enough, not in 2012 at least. Sizable members and departments of the governments, NGOs, advocacy and aid groups, academics and researchers, and the community itself (people with disabilities) have a strong, vocal and influential online presence. It is no longer enough to have a stakeholder meeting with boring – yes, certainly – Powerpoint presentations that talk much about statistics, mobilization and resources, but don’t get the billion-strong public involved in caring for the cause.

Web-based platforms force us to outsell ourselves in order to reach our constituencies; we have to put the best face forward and get people interested in committing to a cause long term. It’s sometimes time-consuming, sometimes easy, just like any ground campaign. Sometimes campaigns click, sometimes people just ignore our outreach messages. It also allows us to choose specific interfaces for promoting specific campaigns. So, Twitter is effective for a type of mobilization and instant outreach, Facebook is more about fostering a close-knit, sustained and concerned community. But we don’t take the liberty of treating online campaigns as a piece of cake, just post a link on Twitter and wait for the website numbers to hit the roof!

When you organize a protest rally with thousands of supporters, do you think about the visibility of your business and the increase in sponsorship if the event is a success, or are you focused on the cause you are championing? Why this double standards in attribution for an online campaign or advocacy then?

As for the community itself on whose behalf we stage an intervention, Web 2.0 and the internet-ecosystem has done much to allow them to tell their story and ask for support the way they want to. Making blanket statements such as ‘the net will set us free’ or the extreme of ‘the net is a corporate-hijacked market’ doesn’t cover the vast sections of the public who don’t subscribe to either of these views nor do they engage with the internet in an extremist fashion, seeking World Peace from a few clicks! We don’t expect ground campaigns to bring about world peace or eradicate poverty forever or grant women equality in all spheres of life, then why expect Web-based, social-media campaigns or messages to bring about the same results?

How do we measure the effectiveness of – not the end result – but the process itself? When we wrote 100 letters to The Editor of the local community newspaper complaining about the pothole-ridden roads, did we expect a response from the Department of Public Works or Transport immediately – or was the point to raise awareness and let others reading the paper know that they too can voice their complains and hope to get a response. Hope comes with no guarantees.

What surprises me about the Kony12 video campaign created by the U.S. NGO Invisible Children is not the video itself (glitzy, PR-inspired take on systemic issues of war, conflict, abuse of children in Uganda several years ago), but rather that the endemic split of the Global North Digital Native and the Digital Native from the Global South just got more pronounced and justified. Digital natives themselves turned on their digital native peers. But instead of engaging with the Director of Invisible Children and offering an honest critique of how the video campaign could have shifted gears or portrayed information in a different format, we went on a rampage, not really interested in the video’s cause, intention or justification but crucifying it because it doesn’t fit in with our world view of how Africa should be portrayed.

Do you claim ownership of this issue? Do you claim rights over how an issue is to be presented in the public domain? Do you have proof of the damaging effects that this video is supposed to generate? Do you have a better plan for helping the victims of Kony’s brutal regime? Do you have some sort of oracular powers that foretell the failure of such videos (and the Bracelet that they are selling!)? How can you predict the inanity of such campaigns without having seen any precedents for it? If you disown this campaign, what’s stopping the social media cynics who label you slacktivists from disparaging your blogs, your tweets and your video campaigns?

I understand the sentiments behind the outrage over the Kony video; I would hate it if my problems were ‘marketed as a product’. But the campaign has got 100 million people to think about what they can do, where as previously they would just watch a campaign video or read a heartfelt letter and move on with their day.

The outrage leaves me with several questions:

1) Did the video backfire because it was made by a WAMDN?

2) Is there a perception that only a WAMDN could have ideated such a “jazzy” video?

3) Do we have an inherent prejudice / bias against the perceived power of the WAMDN and what they do with that perceived power?

4) Would it be okay if a youth from Uganda has thought of this novel way of highlighting an issue?

5) Do we take potshots at ideas that are ahead of their times?

6) Are we still too young or naive to not understand the commerce of a cause – that causes need to be packaged and promoted in order for people to pick them up?

7) Why do we sit in judgement of another person’s efforts to solve a problem in their own weird / bizarre / unique ways – and perhaps they fail – perhaps they succeed – why not let them try?

8) Are we secretly envious that we – the Digital Native from the Global South – did not think of such an ‘in-your-face’ campaign that has received millions of hits, got the attention of leaders and powerful folks, and we couldn’t think of doing something similar?

9) What next? Most of you have disowned the video and the Kony12 campaign as fraud and a commercially-directed venture (they are selling bracelets you see!), but has the world not sat up and taken notice and will in their own, tiny ways DO SOMETHING?

10) What do we hope for when we tell a friend about an injustice? Do we want the friend to sympathize and help us feel better? Or do we hope that she will take our hand and say, “let’s do something about this” and support you in any possible ways – without reservations or judgement?

Coming back to the question, Digital Natives with a Cause?, do I still hold the cynical view that digital natives and cause don’t go together? While it would be a blatant untruth to declare all digital natives as concerned with social change and causes, we cannot rule out that so many of us online are taking an interest in doing ‘something’. We are angry enough to ‘Think up a Meme’ when our small universe is threatened and the Web sends ripples of disturbance to the other tiny universes connected to ours. Perhaps it’s not enough to get a headline grabbing, “Memes Achieve World Peace!”, but we never believed that was possible anyways, right? It’s about getting the least common denominator to pay attention. One person signing-up, one person helping with aid, one person tweeting and one more writing a blog. We never had any precedent for peace before, right? Apart from moving from zero to positive, we have nothing to lose.

It’s obvious that most of us belong to techno-camps. Either you choose to be a techno-cynic and lament the broken promises of technology (see: machines of loving grace), namely eradication of poverty, hunger and world peace. Or you are a techno-utopist, believing in the effervescent promises of a glorious future that will be realized when the full potential of modern technology is utilized.

But there’s an inherent contradiction in belonging to these camps. On one hand, we fantasize about living in a time when robots become common place much like the scenarios played out by sci-fi writers such as Isaac Asimov, Douglas Adams and Arthur C. Clarke who transport us to a world free of domestic, manual and industrial labour and the other promises of deliverance from a harsh life on earth. But it’s also at this point that we prophesize doomsday for mankind brought about by the bio-synthetic hands of robots who want nothing better than to finish us off.  Phew, Shakespeare really should be thanked for succinctly immortalizing our plight when he wrote: To be or not to be!

Our benchmark for a technologically-enhanced future are these contradictory scripts and it’s time we moved past their solipsistic narratives of what awaits mankind in a robo-cy-andy infested world. What comes to fore within these fictional trajectories is hubris – and fear – that our creations cannot surpass our baser instincts of ego, jealousy, fear, envy and greed. By placing robots and cyborgs in a human framework of “intelligence”, we subject them to the same overarching script that we write for ourselves. That explains the A.I. Apocalypse. 

What of the present? Whichever camp you belong to, sci-fi is no longer fictional. Today, we co-exist with robots and cyborgs, but not at the hyper-futuristic diets we were raised on. Prosthesis, implants, embedded chips and circuits, sensors, bio-mechanical objects that aid body functions are steadily making inroads in medical practice. Robots are employed in heavy industries such as construction, mining, chemical and pharmaceutical sectors, to aid doctors in complex surgeries and rehabilitation therapies for patients, in aviation and gaming, education and childcare. How many years before they get a human face on the metallic surfaces and a voice-box to go with that mechanical smile?   

“We shouldn’t have a Frankensteinian fear of incorporating technology into the body, and we shouldn’t consider our relationship to technology in a Faustian way – that we’re somehow selling our soul because we’re using these forbidden energies. My attitude is that technology is, and always has been, an appendage of the body.” – Stelios Arcadiou

Media and cultural observers also talk about external devices that are replicating and fast replacing human functions and abilities. We consider any personal, hand-held, screen-enmeshed interface to be an extension of the self – our digital appendages in essence. So, we are seeing an unprecedented increase in the outsourcing of cognitive functions like memory storage / remembering data or details, calculation and measuring, analytical thinking, problem solving and inference. We expect the machine to pick up after us.

And here’s setting the stage for another one of our contradictory scripts: We expect machines to live up to their names and be just that, unfeeling, unthinking, untiring, and undying instruments of performance. Yet – and I am sure I am not alone in this – we also worry about how we will treat the things. It’s a very human tendency to humanize objects, what psychiatrists would call empathy. Our dolls and teddy-bears become gender-subjective and we christen them with human names – even a baby understands this; the same goes for our beloved canine, feline, avian companions. Do you think we wouldn’t extend the same courtesy to robots and cyborgs? You think we will be satisfied with “Machine, get me a glass of water” (I can see you cringe). A tough existential question would be, whether to refer to your machine, as a he / she or “it”!

If we begin to develop empathy for our machines – and I believe this will happen sooner than we realize – imagine the laws that would come into place for fair workplace practices for robots, including time-off, vacation and tune-up (sick) leaves! A society where we think about the welfare of machines, imagine that. There wouldn’t be any dread about marauding machines and tyrannical T-100s (a la Terminator 1, 2, 3, 4) rising up in revolt against the autocratic humans.

And like David, the A.I. who gets an unexpected wish fulfilled when he dreams for the first time in Steve Spielberg’s A.I., perhaps, the robots and cyborgs of our times will dream of hybrid sheep while their human caretakers sing a lullaby. Wishful thinking? Perhaps a robot reading this post in the future could throw a hint!

Appeared as editorial in Digital Natives with a Cause newsletter, Volume 9 Issue 3, February 2012: http://self-employed.cmail3.com/t/ViewEmail/j/618450E416FA6B7C

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