CC BY
61
ТЕМА НОМЕРА
П. Биджу, О.Гайятри
АТОМЫ БИТОВ: ПРОТЕСТ И ПОЛИТИКА ИНДИИ В ИНТЕРНЕТ
Аннотация
Альтернативные или радикальные СМИ или социальные сети, как мы считаем используют протестные группы, общественные активисты, общественные движения, адвокаты, неправительственные организации (НПО), субкультуры и фан активисты, активисты и увлеченные своим хобби обычно приняли как механизмы протеста и изменения «каналов сопротивления». Такое сопротивление явно, сознательно и целенаправленно ставит вопрос и вызов главным структурам в символической борьбе за значение. Они не подчиняются законам рынка, ни зависят от государства. Они работают в области гражданского общества (транснационального, национального и местного), строя себя. Выяснилось, что новый политический субъект, скромно вводит весь объем цифровой медиакультуры в рамках социального движения в Индии. В центре такого вводного исследования, стоит вопрос о том, насколько цифровые технологии могут способствовать формированию и стабилизации устоявшихся понятий (концептов) политической науки, механизмах протеста и изменении их свойства.
Ключевые слова:
clicktivism, объединеный капитал, weak-^е, один клик, активизм
P. Biju, O. Gayathri
ATOMS TO BITS: PROTEST AND POLITICS IN INTERNET INDIA
Abstract
Alternative or radical media or social web that we reckon for protest groups, social activists, social movements, advocacy, Non Governmental Organisations (NGO), subcultures and sometimes fan activism, life style activists, and hobbyists have popularly understood as mechanics of protest and change and 'channels of resistance'. Such resistances explicitly, deliberately and with commitment question and challenge hegemonic structures in a symbolic fight for meaning. They are neither subject to the laws of the market nor dependent on the state. They operate in the field of civil society (transnational, national and local), which are building itself. Therefore, a new political subject revealed that this volume modestly introduces digital media cultures within social movements in India. At the centre of such an introductory exploration, therefore, stands the question as to what extent digital technology can contribute to the formation and stabilisation of conventional political science concepts, protest mechanics and change properties.
Key words:
Clicktivism, Bridging Capital, Weak-tie, Clicking Alone, Lifestyle Activism
Our pre-occupation with conceptual categories such as social capital, hybridisation and convergence political cultures, political identities, marginality, life style politics, protest and collective action, deliberative politics, open government, educational practices, etc., all that profoundly began to migrate from at-
oms to bits in the contemporary cyber culture. The rampant 'concept travels' from offline spaces to online social spaces, necessitate an understanding of cyber culture in India on the backdrop of ethnography in digital sphere. Signing up an account in a social networking site, sharing a link on Facebook Wall or LinkedIn updates, uploading a video in YouTube, posting a photo on Flickr, typing 140 characters in Twitter, posting an essay on Blogger, and obviously many more, all that create an imaginary public space. However, how many among us has showed concern for the tangible benefits of the clicks we make. Is it advisable to think that many of our mouse clicks feed millions of hungry people or spread messages that lead to tangible benefits to those victimised by their caste, gender, class etc. A disturbing set of literature has grown up that both criticise and appreciate social media's political potential. Yet, with gnawing gap and barbed continuity, social media and social change tie-up has not grown up of age in the womb of India's digital mind but confined only to the ambush of good vs. bad binary debate prevailing all over the world.
Clicking Alone
With the growing cyber culture, human relationships have become rich, frenzied, demanding, often sentimental and more complex in connective spaces. At times, we stop being compassionate and we overlook that there is a difference and think that our little "clicks" of online connection add up to a big gulp of real conversation. All the same, they do not. A frenzied kind of seesaw sentiments takes shape over our migration from atoms to bits. LinkedIn, E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, and many more, all of these have their places in politics, commerce, romance and friendship. However, our experience with social web, no matter how valuable, has proved that they do not substitute for real conversation. Yet, we have educated the habit of cleaning real conversation with technology we use. The move from conversation to connection is part of this. However, we have skewed ourselves in the process.
Now connection works like a credo, but not a panacea and our unvarying, thoughtless impulse to connect shapes a new way of being. Think of it as "I share that you share that you share that I share that we share." Here we use technology to label ourselves by sharing our thoughts and feelings as we have ensnared in them. When we want to make a call, it foregrounds that we have a feeling. With digital sociality, now our impulse is that, I need to send a text just because I want to have a feeling. We have transformed our feelings, sentiments, emotions in to the text we make in the smart devices we have and in the nebulous alternative media platforms we have inhabited in that devices. When we think that, our constant connection will make us feel less lonely; the opposite becomes truthful.
The assumption is that assimilation of social media platforms has structured an expanding 'click-sphere', which this volume pinpoints in the trail of social media and political sphere merging as 'clicking alone' model. Contentious politics, social capital, civil society, political identity, fomented in the 'mouse click' model here understand as 'clicking alone', i.e., the crossing point of 'mouse click', individualised and personalised politics and 'political sphere' in Indian Internet. The social media related recent incidents underlines that activism can confine not only to the way we have looked at this, years back. Anna Hazare movement, Shaheen Dada, Ambikesh Mahapatra, Subrata Sengupta, Ravi Srinivsan, Aseem Trivedi, Jaya Vindhayala and a plethora of social media related episodes in India proves the close association between clicks we make, Individualized and personalised political dissent and digital media.
Over the past few years, people around the world have become increasingly aware of and interested in the expanding use of digital technologies such as Cell phones and Internet-enabled platforms for acts that are digitally political and conceptually public. The claustrophobic social media landscape has shielded a new form of public space and political acts such as social media for advocacy, m-governance, e-governance, digital protest. These practices, which this work hereby refer to as clicking alone, have been reported and dissected by bloggers, media practitioners and eagerly studied by scholars, professors, students, activists, and enthusiasts. Just as the modus operandi of Internet powered social change mechanics has fogged up with obscurity, so is the vocabulary associated with internet-enabled activism for social and political cause.
In the literature, contrasting positions reflecting both utopia and dystopia echo between writers who see the technology as a new basis for social inclusion, social capital and community (Rheingold 2000; Wellman 1997; Lin 2001) and others who see it as a menace, leading to new forms of exclusion and a decline in face-to-face contacts (Stoll 1995; Slouka 1995). Are the new technologies leading to new forms of social inclusion or to exclusion and creating new forms of togetherness or divide? Is there any fundamental change on social support, social networks, trust and sense of community by the rapid development of the Internet?
Clicking Alone structures that the lone attempt at protesting, collaborating, publishing and networking from the Tablets, PC or Cell phone has resulted in the making of a sense of "alone together" in Indian Internet. We live in a nebulous social media landscape in which we are at all times being in touch. Does tens of millions of people making Post, Send, Enter, Follow Visit, Comment, Update, Tweet, Share, Retweet, Like, Wall, Notes, Reply, Forward, Collaborate, Scrap, Bookmark, Forum, Upload and many more; carry potentially anything that virtually embrace 'bridging' or 'bonding'
online? In the bits, people take digitally, what people have always been taking in the atoms. They create friends online and spot enemies virtually, do assert and seek individuality and status, look for affirmation and connection, check out the competition and above all, ask for the comfort of community. The nebulous social media powered hyper-connectivity mark a social physics of online interactions that are starkly different from those of the offline world and that has far-reaching consequences. A different type of seeing, viewers, diligence, exchange and other structural attributes combine to create a different kind of social architecture.
The perspective Clicking Alone begins where Robert Putnam (2000) end up the seminal work Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, etc., have played in reclaiming levels of social capital and we have habituated to a new way of being alone together by 'clicking alone' in new media platforms. With the Digital media-powered sociality, we are able to be in touch with one another, and elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be, yet we remain alone in the shapeless, intangible horizon of the cyber space in the Tablets, Cell phone or PC. We want to adapt our lives to a new form of detached attachment.
Personal dissent and resistance politics acquires newer dimensions, when we heard Kanwal Bharti, Jaya Vindhayala and Shaheen Dhada's Face-book arrest, Aseem Trivedi's arrest for Internet cartooning, Ambikesh Maha-patra and Subrata Sengupta's email arrest, Ravi Srinivasan's Twitter arrest, S Manikandan's blog arrest. Now we propose the question, is the social media embedded personalised politics and individual lifestyle dissent calls for redefining protest paradigm in the connective spaces. Does the lone individual personal political dissent reported in social web carry the same effect that has spearheaded by the violence and working class agitation at Maruti Suzuki India's Manesar plant or Gandhi's Dandi march or call for Total Revolution by Jayaprakash Narayan?
The social agenda, both governmental and media, of contemporary days seem mediated by lone individual social web profiles. On 18-12-2013 at the 10 PM news round up of NDTV, there was a special report on the social media responses of gang rape of 23-year-old woman in a moving bus in South Delhi on 16-12-2012 and what Twitter, Facebook and YouTube has said about this sorry things. Twitter comment by celebrity author Shobhaa De became prime time news hour debate in almost all media recently (IANS 31 July 2013). Who gets, what, when and how, the cattle class controversy or views on naming the proposed anti-rape law after the 16 December rape victim, Shashi Tharoor makes the agenda of the nation wide political debate on Twitter. L K Advani and Narendra Modi, leading Indian politicians make their political commentaries on Twitter and blogs that attract unheard of pub-
lic and media attention. Now, every day, prime time news incorporated what so and so said about subjects ranging from coffin to rocket in the social web.
Following Anna Hazare led anti-graft movement and Delhi gang rape; social media began to address a 'critical mass'. The emerging online social spaces for story telling have reflected the growing sentiments of middle and upper classes, the intellectuals, activists and journalists. Overthrowing the protest paradigms, the rally of life style politics, contentious politics, new social movements, social capital, personal dissent, and civil society and NGO spaces, to the Web 2.0 makes all notions about protest look as if changed in digital India. Illusion or certainty, a growing sense of delegitimisation of protest paradigm surfaces when our life gets akin to petition sites, email lists, online fund raising, social networking sites, blogs and micro blogs, video sharing sites, photo uploading and content sharing sites.
Clicking, liking, sharing, or commenting, on social web, the bitter experiences that many digital nomads of Indian Internet encountered makes us in deep trouble over the liberatory potential of Internet. Dissent or protest, many known and unknown, heard and unheard, satisfied and dissatisfied, a whole lot of individual lone actors now began to resort to a space to make their own protest spaces. Now it is much clearer that social web has turned up more than a private sphere. It is the town square of the world, dissenters' paradise and many more.
The enormous popularity of Web 2.0 lifestyle technologies such as what-to-buy- blogs, what-to-cook-healthy portals, what-to-wear fashion blogs, why-I-am-against-nuclear-energy communities, etc., all of which tell us how to fashion our life to fine-tune planet for sustainable life. The shopping and style guide apps available for our smart phones, good book read applications on our profile, the habit website bookmarked, news updates subscribed to our computer, etc., demonstrate that millions of people want the life style technologies to express their personal political choices. From atoms to bits, liberally we have reproduced and echoed the otherwise not possible usual life style practices.
Do we ever know that the Wall posts, Like marks, Share it widgets and a fleet of interactive tools in Facebook have turned up making our stockpile of nihilism, skepticism, pessimism about capitalist consumerism, and a whole bunch of globalised products. Clicktivism, i.e., the resurfacing of life style politics in social web incorporated a fleet of platforms to network based on personalised politics on the backdrop of the collateral falling of collectivised politics. e-mailism, e-petitioning, digital collaboration, online fund raising, online publishing tools, bridging online capital via weak-tie network, and a plethora of new forms of digital collaboration reproduces our life style politics in Internet. Of course, large and expanding sections of Indians, moving to social web like Facebook, Blogger are a political choice. It is a personal dis-
sent, individual resistance, personalised political action. If not, how do we get a space of our own in an otherwise illiberal social hierarchy and immobile social physics?
Collective action means entirely different in a society entirely permeated by microphysics of power. Contentious politics, cultural politics, life style politics, personalised politics, and now a large spectre of cultural terminologies reconfigured to diffuse the cultural chemistry of new class, new power and new movements. The hidden networks of groups, secretive meeting points, circuits of solidarity, all that reformulate profoundly the image of a new political actor; YOU, i.e., the individual.
A fleet of social media related episodes in India proves the symbiotic relationship between life style politics and digital media and it proves that a new social space has born in the trajectory of discursive practices and cyber culture. How many among us who have profile accounts in Facebook, Twitter, etc., have really known that we have teleported a whole lot of life style activism from atoms to bits? Do we know that our social web accounts have turned up a dustbin of our fringe thoughts of habitual practices? Clicktivism is a label that we meaninglessly and blatantly deploy to extend the personal as political. We do it at Net because it does not require much effort, cost, etc., and you need not to risk blood and flesh at bumpy streets and town squares for doing activism. We habituated to this new water bubbles. We habituated to the tiny devices we have. We habituated to connective spaces even in our small bit of leisure time.
We live in the era of individual and lone protestor; it is so a power shift that individual has turned up solo protestor instead of collectivised politics. Now, oftentimes, mature and grown up individuals constrained by the tradition bound stereotypes, orthodox family structures, social status, family honour, patriarchal social system, virtue syndrome of brothers on sisters, gender disparity at home, romance castration at households, friendship fear of family members, the peeping culture of kith and kin, do we find a solace in the social web. We may refer this life style activism, i.e., individuals making political choices in an otherwise rigid social space. Atoms are not bits as a sea distance resurfaces between the two in the referral case of a particular class of people who afford frequently to clicktivism, i.e., life style politics at Net.
The world we live in and work came to resurface new forms of meaning making, i.e., lifestyle politics such as veganism, bicycle and pedestrian culture, raw foodism, ethnic food activism, government schooling, falling in love with mother toungue, thoughts about alternative energy like wind and solar, lamenting Bandh and Hartal, arguing for hand made 'Khadi' clothing, and so on. It is one of many versions of what we may call lifestyle politics. People might say it is an ideology of living day-to-day in accord with the planet and humankind. This ideal entails, sowing own clothes, composting, bicycling,
growing and canning our own vegetables, buying only products from recycled materials, and so on. Equally important is the question do we know that our life style based on personal is political and choices based on ideologies we practice every day has reproduced and teleported to the social web.
Clicktivism is a meticulous life style practice that is able to include a horde of diverse phenomena in Internet such as consumer protest, new social movements, post material values, anti- nuclear advocacy, contentious politics, human rights activism, civil rights advocacy, anti-capitalist struggles, gender sensitisation, anti-graft movement, rape victim activism etc. Nevertheless, personalised politics acquired newer forms on issues that are new and unprecedented. User-generated platforms have co-opted new form of life style practices that resurfaced a set of discursive sites with new movement perspectives. A host of issues discussed in social media platforms, recently, for instances; ecology, human rights, freedom of expression, sentiments against corruption, strike, 'Bandh', are few parameters where social media has been used to mobilise and protest in novel ways which falls in the perspective of life style politics in India.
Today, the new social agenda focuses on the nexus between lifestyle choices and political dissent. Creating an alternative subculture or lifestyle is the preferred choice of resistance to the effects of capitalism, State sponsored violence, development related displacement and rehabilitation, etc. From greed to over consumption, from destruction of the environment to worker exploitation, a solution will occur with a simple process of alternative consumption or lifestyle.
The presentation of self, contentious claims and assertion of identity by a whole lot of fringe margins in the complex social structure of India, loosely become coordinated since digital platforms. In the nebulous social media platforms in Internet India, we were almost certain that the touch screens and mouse clicks we make add up to a new infotopia in Indian mind. The complex social structure of India being inhospitable to 'low' cultures based on different identities historically had always co-opted the high cultures in the communicative spaces. Here the question comes to our mind are we just copying and pasting all those dominant 'Brahmanic' narratives and high culture story telling practices in Internet.
The social media related fresh incidents underlines that activism can confine not only to the way we have looked at this years back. Discursive practices in India's social structure historically represented privileged few at the cost of a majority of fringe margins. So, the linguistic and cultural anthropology of our communicative practices depicts a Hinduised, Sanskritised, westernised India through a range of literary, artistic, and cinematic texts India produced. When cinematic texts depicted Brahmanic social systems,
literary narratives depicted high culture; artistic culture eulogized visual narratives of Hinduised India,
It was only the cyber space that provided the unheard, unreached and the untouched a space where they could articulate the local culture as counter culture. Therefore, Internet culture in India is a discursive site that faces a confrontation between modern and the ancient. Social media has just reproduced or coped and pasted all the contours of our social structure in internet. Marginality, as we understood has a different meaning in the discursive site of Internet.
We have produced, reproduced and unproduced all our primordial and primitive loyalties in internet, at times we have to do this. Since digital platforms provided a site of contentious politics, we have reproduced caste in social media, gender stereotypes in Internet, digital rapes, cyber divas, cyber extremism, misogyny, etc., in new forms, and now the old wine is in new bottles. Yet, we see marginality and cyber culture co-exist in Indian internet, so we face a warring ancient with the confounding modern.
The newer form of counter-culture produced in Internet are of course not a site of dominant culture, but a site of marginality asserting its selfportrayals that otherwise impossible in the tradition bound media, literature, and a host social carriers. Yet, we are sure that behind every Facebook community, there is potential Pakistan hidden. It is shocking that beneath every cyber portals, there are harmful misogynists. The claustrophobic caste based social networking sites in cyber space is testimony to the fact that a silent revolution is taking place among caste identities, but what direction. Consequently, it is not wise enough to think that what happens in social web is all about paradise teleported but a déjà vu. Now Internet has found a Pandora box for all the marginality, identity, and discursive practices. We come to realise that there is not much difference between atoms and bits when it sounds that the next world war that fought between cyber groups is on the question of identity and marginality.
To bring about a fresh understanding about the mechanics of Internet powered change and protest movements in India, however, necessitates ethnographic approach to technology-mediated activism. While doing this, exploration has taken to the categories that has commonly used in India and enquires whether terms and conceptual techniques actually reflect Indian situation such as language, culture, values etc. A 'technography' perspective has developed in the crossing point of ethnography and technology in a local and indigenous context.
Do we exhibit the maturity of grown up democracy while dealing with a host of social media related protest events reported in India for the last few years? Aseem Trivedi cartoons and his arrest for alleged anti-graft cartooning in Internet has showed the tolerance threshold of Indian democracy and the
power of social media in making authority responsible to citizens. Ambikesh Mahapatra, Subrata Sengupta, Shaheen Dhada and Ravi Srinivsan have become labels for contentious claim making recently in Internet platforms. The arrest of Jaya Vindhayala, woman activist of the NGO outfit People's Union for Civil Liberties in Andhra Pradesh also confirms that there are looming confusion regarding the political potential and activist chemistry of social media and its subsequent vulnerability of hate speech. At the same time, many other related events on social media and a host of related Internet episodes show that there exist a confusion regarding what is 'doable' and 'un-doable' in respect of social media powered protest through internet.
While criticising people who protest lone and solo in Internet, did we show proper ethnocentric perspective towards technology powered activism whether such act being either digital skepticism or utopianism. India's rich cultural diversity and complex social structure take its own route in the digital media. While exploring the social media embedded public sphere, sufficient attention should go on to such factors. This makes the call for a digital ethnographic perspective to understand India's techno-graphic public.
Flat public creates a simulated real world illusion in online spaces. Digital citizen and their solo individual clicks on the mouse for marking online all those that have been usual in offline world. The digitalisation of human sentiments through optical fibers marks the end of flattening of the 'real' offline world and emergence of a new cyber illusion of flat world online. Greater the embedding of digital platforms in the political subjects in Internet, higher the illusion about cyber unreal. Hence, a new trend is on rise since greater social media incorporation in political communication in India that is flattening of public.
The incorporation of new media especially social media in political engagement and electoral communication has more or less contributed to consolidate cultural imperialism and information hegemony in world politics. The American hegemony via digital supremacy is surfacing as never before. Digital America is being exported world over. Globalisation has vitalised and prompted Americanisation of political communication and politics across the world. The Indian political scenario is nonetheless becoming more American than Indian with the digitalisation of politics and online political engagement.
In India, the sweeping penetration of American value and practices in politics from local to national political process is the outcome of use of social media platforms in electoral engagement. The dominant modus operandi still being the conventional engagement, there is slight increase in the use of online platforms for electoral process in India. Even though, electronic device for political communication has exploited in Indian electoral democracy, it amounts to brazen imitation of American electoral eco-system. India is facing the Americanisation of political communication largely fed up by social media
platforms, which has unleashed by American technology and trajectory of digital supremacy and the U.S. political environment.
Cell phone embedded second People Power Revolution in Philippines, anti-government movement online following death of Neda Agha Soltan in Iran, YouTube video showing self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi in Tunisia, Egypt's 2011 unrest consequent to video tape showing the death of Khaled Said; all show the power of social media in effecting political changes across a broad spectrum of countries recently. The Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, The UK Uncut are digital media empowered protest movements that raised convergence-divergence debate by focusing on how network structures at the international level affect policy outcomes, activist propaganda, advocacy and politics in native society. All these episodes prove that social media collaboration and application for advocacy and protest has become almost a ubiquitous means to achieve political goals everywhere on the planet from north to south and west to east.
Convergence and divergence in domestic politics, public spaces and policies have considered as different ends of a continuum. Depending on network positions of specified countries, their national societies are subject to differential levels of pressure to acclimatise to the forces of globalisation: Internet, food, Television, entertainment, social media etc. This results in national variations in a wide range of domestic policy outcomes, public discourses and political engagements. The similarity of network positions induces convergence in domestic economic policies because of competitive pressure from other similar countries. Facebook, YouTube, twitter, etc., have become as powerful as elsewhere in India. Proximity in network positions facilitates communication and policy learning which in turn brings about domestic policy convergence among analogous countries.
A significant component in the mounting hegemony in global homogenising culture is the dominance of the English language in computation, Internet and international electronic communication. The other side of this effectual elimination is from the digital engagement is that of the great majority of the India's population that does not speak English. However, for much of the rest of the developing world, the inaccessibility of computers and electronic communications to people who do not speak English constitutes an impossible hurdle to entry into the digital homogenisation.
Signing a petition in petition.com against Delhi rape incident, creating a Facebook community in support of Koodankulam anti-nuclear movement, tweeting against corrupt political class do carry any tangible benefit for the people at the street. The growing literature on the socially useful application of social media, in fact will have a seesaw of their answers polarised. For the digital skeptics, digital media is bound to bring about a fulcrum of false promises where as it is liberation for digital optimists. A plethora of
dystopian and utopian configuration both take over to elucidate the social media powered mechanics of change all over, but is it sufficient to look the Indian experience.
The digital natives and migrants have configured equally in the trajectory of social media powered mechanics of change in contemporary digital India and the wired public movement has acquired popularity in protest activities. However, new media embedded change movement has been facing elementary challenges in its taxonomy. Many ideas have already been in the air, by publication and discussion in media outlet, academia and publishing world to highlight this multifarious correlation. Many terms are currently popular to underscore the diverse task social media platforms underlines to pinpoint its unavoidable presence from courtyards of our houses to the Office of the President. Popular uses like 'digitivism', 'tweetivism', 'cyberactivism' 'internet advocacy', 'Government 2.0' and many more such uses known and unknown in different corners are common on many lips. Technical terms both 'for and against' has almost became cliché among many circles, for instances, weak-tie, slcaktivism, Web 2.0, which are highly popular and acceptable. Plenty of other terms, also are in the 'foetal' stage and yet to come out of the womb of academic scholarship and that are likely to dominate most discussions.
In a time when politics becomes decidedly hierarchical and feudalistic, engaging with the citizen is almost an ancient ideal and remains only in principle. Formal political institutions have almost become nastiest to most of citizens in democracies in conviction. Institutionalised politics becomes an anachronism when civil society supersedes established way of exchange and negotiation. Democratising democracies become an inevitable corollary of modern democracy and an ideal yet to achieve. Open Government is an indicator of democratisation of democracy and the incorporation of connective spaces for citizen engagement. It is therefore, a prerequisite of every government that government should be 'transparent', 'participatory' and 'collaborative'. Connective democracy is an attempt to highlight the place of social media in open government movement. In today's networked world, the public sector and public authority is tapping into new media applications to increase participation, transparency and collaboration.
The rationale of connective democracy is to introduce fresh needle for measuring government openness, transparency and collaboration. Existing open government indicators tend to focus either on the presence of key laws and institutions or on citizens perceptions of government performance. The underlying argument is that conventional notions of openness, transparency and collaboration are insufficient to understand open government. The degree to which governments deal with social media is now part of how they deal with civil liberties, press freedom, privacy and freedom of expression in general.
Social media technologies hold great promise in their ability to transform governance by increasing government's transparency and its interaction with citizens. The interactive and instant capabilities and the increasingly pervasive nature of social media technologies can create new ways of democratic participation, pressures for new institutional structures and processes and frameworks for open and transparent government on an unprecedented scale. These potentials are profound, but come with challenges in the areas of policy development, governing and governance, process design, and conceptions of democratic engagement. This document provides a selected overview of key issues, questions, and best practice government initiatives regarding social media technologies. Open government initiatives via social web signify the migration of Netizen from nomadism to activism. Politics is a strong test and entertainment is weak test for the nomads of Indian Internet. Going online means more to citizens in the feudalized and hierarchical society of India Government and public institutions are there by taking close to citizens.
The political significance of social media has acquired greater credence in the trajectory of social exclusion and demand for inclusive education. Connective learning configures social media for educational practices. In the visible social stratification and structural constrains seen in the tradition-bound Indian society, social media acquires widest political relevance to education in respect of access, quality, cost, time, geography and parity. Traditionally, education has been inaccessible to many social groups in India and historically elitist since it has afforded by higher caste in the social hierarchy.
Education 2.0 refers the huge numbers of technological developments especially social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Blogger which facilitate teaching and learning, while they can be accessible anytime and anywhere through check, Share, tweet, comment, post and upload tools and motivate learners to expand their knowledge through further exploration and collaboration through user generated content. Education remains, still unattainable for a large section such as women, tribes, minorities and marginal sections. Besides this, barriers to education such as quality, access, and cost are still haunting the prospects of good education to many sections.
The political resolution to the prevailing apartheid in education seems reducible to a relevant extent since India undergoing digital revolution. Projecting Internet as a liberated ideal has acquired much popularity. Internet has greater significance to reach out to all those that were collaterally falling to achieve before Internet. Any educational practice that concerns the playful, expressive, reflective or exploratory aspects of knowledge building is likely to find web 2.0 tools and services powerfully a political resource. When directed at learning, web 2.0 impacts on four principal dimensions of the
learner's experience. Two are broadly social in nature (collaboration and publication) and two are more cognitive (literacies and inquiry).
The fundamental question is that will the increasing diversity of the our population, i.e., social and political formations based on different primordial allegiances and national secular identities become more common and homogenous, while the gradual trend towards digital identity likely to continue over the coming years? A key message for policy makers is that digital identities can be a positive resource for social change, promoting wellbeing and building social capital but they can also have a role in social and political unrest, hate campaign, antisocial behaviour, identity crimes, etc., that requires concerted effort to curb.
Elephant, Lotus and Bicycle, we know that political symbols of identity formations in everyday political mind of India. Identity transformed digital observes identity in India is changing. The phantom advances in technology, in particular affect the social construct of identity. The mechanics of constant connection, i.e., hyper-connectivity, the claustrophobic social media landscape, the expanding online sociality, re-configured digital persona, signify the changes transported to identity. In fact, India's Twitter republic, Face-book nation, YouTube politics, blogosphere and Bluetooth democracy has configured in the trajectory of a vibrant demographic divide. Growing younger generation and decreasing elder population.
This volume explores the relationship between Internet in general and social media in particular, the resultant identity formation and its implication for political sphere, social relations and secular State. While we are busy creating virtual communities in Facebook, search professional contacts in LinkedIn, watch videos in YouTube, post in Blogger, Tweet about violence, sharing photos in Flickr, and building a visible record of ourselves for anyone to see, we should also think the implications of this for the concept of identity. More often, identity enabled political sphere will take new dimensions since digitalisation of democracy and online political engagement in India. This requires enquiry that calls for the making this volume.
Politicisation of sexual minorities in Internet is potentially a worldwide practice. Obviously, in the physical social world, currently sexual identities and deprived sexual minorities are discriminated, silenced and marginalised. Internet offers them, connective spaces to thicken intimate relations. We still live in a society where LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex) people attacked in the street, bullied in schools, unrepresented in the media and oppressed in many other ways.
In the www.321chat.com, one would get a whole lot of chat options such as gay chat, lesbian chat, webcam chat, black chat, Latin chat, religion chat, Asian chat etc. All notions of racial, gender, ethnic, colour, geographic divisions and disparities between people and communities of people have
equally reproduced even in sexual, pornographic and mere fun entertainment industries in cyber space. In fact, Internet provides LGBTQI groups and other sexual minorities to share, network, collaborate with like-minded people which otherwise not possible in the offline world. Internet is a safe haven of marginalised sexual minorities to search for new relationships that are out of scrutiny by the draconian laws and hostile social structure.
What are young women doing online in Indian cities, and urban houses? Do sexual minorities get a space unrestrained by feudal social structure and patriarchal social order? From chatting to blogging to posting, to Facebook, to Twitter, etc., the lone individuals and solo dissenters of Indian Internet from marital displeasure, disharmony with family, dissatisfied with social structure, has began to find a new self cross across potentially inhospitable social structure, taboo ridden social order and patriarchal world.
Conclusion
Dystopia or utopia, what characterises social media embedded mechanics of protest and change recently reported in the local context of India. A seesaw of reactions powered by digital skepticism and optimism strives to explain when we check, share, post, tweet, upload, etc., for protesting against nuclear reactors, corruption, gender violence, environmental degradation and many more. Yet, the western notions of human nature reflected in the founding philosophy of social websites mirrors its insufficiency to reconfigure in Indian context, what it has configured in the social media and political change admix in western scenario. However, our engagement with social media public sphere amalgamation has just an imitation and reproduction of Americanism. This volume is an attempt to dissect the incompetence of alien categories, variables and conceptual tools used to illustrate the social media political engagement in the recent incidents reported in the nook and corner of India. The attempt is to visualise an infotopia in digital India.
Signing a petition in petition.com against Delhi rape incident, creating a Facebook community in support of Koodankulam anti-nuclear movement, tweeting against corrupt political class and many more, do carry any tangible benefit for the people at the street. The growing literature on the socially useful application of social media, in fact will have a seesaw of their answers polarised. For the digital skeptics, digital media is bound to bring about a fulcrum of false promises where as it is liberation for digital optimists. A plethora of dystopian and utopian configuration both take over to elucidate the social media powered mechanics of change all over, but is it sufficient to look the Indian experience.
The digital natives and migrants have configured equally in the trajectory of social media powered mechanics of change in contemporary digital India and
the wired public movement has acquired popularity in protest activities. However, new media embedded change movement has been facing elementary challenges in its taxonomy. Many ideas have already been in the air, by publication and discussion in media outlet, academia and publishing world to highlight this multifarious correlation. Many terms are currently popular to underscore the diverse task social media platforms underlines to pinpoint its unavoidable presence from courtyards of our houses to the Office of the President. Popular uses like 'digitivism', 'tweetivism', 'cyberactivism' 'internet advocacy', 'Government 2.0' and many more such uses known and unknown in different corners are common on many lips. Technical terms both 'for and against' has almost became cliché among many circles, for instances, "weak-tie" "slcaktivism", "Web 2.0", which are highly popular and acceptable. Plenty of other terms, also are in the 'foetal' stage and yet to come out of the womb of academic scholarship and that are likely to dominate most discussions.
Discussion surfacing new media and political public has sharply bifurcated in to two powerful and opposing streams of thought (Norris 2001). Comprised of digital pessimists and optimists, digital media literature has equally taken over to buttress the growing intermingling of social media and political change in contemporary public life in opposing direction. Gratifying social media has accomplished colourful story. Analytical tools are heavy in use among the televangelist of social media for illustrating its emancipatory potential, for instance; 'Dragonfly Effect' (Aaker and Smith 2010), 'Here Comes Everybody'(Shirky 2009) 'People Powered Uprising' (Tuffekci 2011), 'Streetbook' (Pollock 2011), 'Cute Cat Theory Talk'(Zuckerman 2008) and such an overload of analytical categories is popular among many circles. On the other end of the spectrum, there are the 'digital skeptics' that they had many testaments to their literatures vehemently cynical of the 'liberatory' potential of new media technologies. Conceptual categories such as 'Net Delusion' (Morozov 2012), 'Zero Comments' (Lovink 2008), 'Weak-tie'(Gladwell 2010), 'Slacktivism' (Granovetter 1973) and more terms of such frequency are on the mould of theoretical exposition in many corners.
The mechanics of protest and change discussed in this volume cover a wide range of topics about a solo theme, i.e., the meeting of individual lone dissenters and social web. However, this is rather a modest introduction to concepts, practices, analytical tools on the backdrop of social web and the social change dynamics in the Indian context, which invariably include both utopia and dystopia of internet-enabled activism. The volume made attempt to provide a balanced view of social media use in contemporary social and political life. The fact is to see an entirely different perspective about social media in a vertically conceptualised platform where accepting social media is defensible than rejecting it.
References
1. Aaker J., Andy S. The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways To Use Social Media to Drive Social Change, John Wiley & Sons. 2010.
2. Mumbai statehood remark: Shiv Sena says Shobhaa De talking as if she was drunk after Page 3 party // India Today. URL: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/mumbai-statehood-shiv-sena-calls-shobha-de-twitter-remark-drunk-after-page-3-party/1/297319.html (accessed: 13.05.2013).
3. Gladwell M. Small Change - Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted. New Yorker. 2010. October 4.
4. Granovetter M. The Strength of Weak Ties // American journal of sociology. 1973. Vol. 78. №6.
5. Lin N. Social capital: A theory of structure and action. London: Cambridge University Press. 2001.
6. Lovink G. Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, Taylor and Francis Group. 2008.
7. Morozov E. The Net Delusion, Public Affairs. 2012.
8. Rheingold H. The Virtual Community. Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. London: MIT Press. 2000.
9. Pollock J. How Egyptian and Tunisian youth hacked the Arab Spring // MIT Technology Review. URL: http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/ 425137/streetbook/ (accessed: 30.11.2012).
10. Putnam R.D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York: Simon and Schuster. 2000.
11. Stoll C. Silicon Snake Oil: Second thoughts on the Information Highway. New York: Doubleday. 1995.
12. Wellman B. An Electronic Group is Virtually a Social Network / In S. Kiesler (ed.), The Culture of the Internet. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. 1997.
13. Shirky C. The Political Power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change // Foreign Affairs, Council on Foreign Relations. URL: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Shirky.pdf (accessed: 30.11.2012).
14. Slouka M. War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the high-tech assault on reality. New York: Basic Books. 1995.
15. Tufekci Z. New Media and the People-Powered Uprisings // MI Technology Review. URL: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/425280/new-
media-and-the-people-powered-uprisings/ (accessed: 30.11.2012)
16. Zuckerman E. The Cute Cat Theory Talk at ETech // Blog. URL: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2008/03/08/the-cute-cat-theory-talk-at-etech/ (accessed: 30.11.2012)
