Nishant Shah

Social media has become the de facto visual representation of the digital. The infinite scroll seduces all our attention and it is also where the drama is. It is designed for human engagement and consumption and offers cybernetic feedback loops of instant gratification. They feed us with something almost being said, a sentence without an end, an expression that hasn’t yet been completed, a tale that grows in its telling, thus keeping us hooked to what is just around the corner. Thus, when we say “online”, or “connected”, or “digital”, we eventually narrow it down to apps and sites and platforms that we engage with through different digital devices. This focus on social media as synonymous with the digital works two ways: One, it shapes our digital devices to be continually updated to join these social media platforms, thus creating the need for everything to be smart and controlled by our phones and bodies. Two, it shapes our lives to be documented, streamed and stored through these ubiquitous devices that surround us. In the midst of this updating to remain Continue Reading …

When in 2015, with the WhatsApp-like messaging services surging high, the Indian Tricolour emoji was released, there was a lot of scoffing about it. To reduce the national flag to a cartoonish icon was a mockery. The lofty flag, it was felt, should not just be a symbol so lightly thrown around, with the possibility that you were using it while sitting on the toilet seat, phone in your hands. In the five years since it has been released, we have seen the flag emoji proliferate in different forms – generally trending around Independence and Republic Days, when patriotism becomes fashionable online, showing up when Indian athletes and sportspersons win important accolades, and also in those bizarre forwards where we keep on claiming that we got certified by international institutions as having best anthems, cities, plans, and culture. The Indian flag emoji, in our digital conversations, has come to stand in for national pride and celebration of our people. However, in the last few months, since the extraordinary demonstrations against the National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, have taken the Continue Reading …

History has always had chroniclers who tell tales of where and who we were when the world was changing. Histories are important because they eventually define who we are, and where we come from. When history repeats itself, it doesn’t bring the past to life but shapes the future of our present. The anxiety in history has often been that there is scarce information, limited data, and biased recordings which, eventually, reflect the view of the winner, rather than the woes of the vanquished. In the world of constant communication, incessant information, and continuous computing, this changes. When everybody is wearing an information recording device; when drones and smart devices capture live streams of what we do; when algorithms training on expansive datasets learn to depict, sort, and classify reality in patterns of easy recognition, we know things are different. However, we live in an age of information overload: our protests get streamed, songs of resistance get recorded, presence gets marked on point-and-shoot cameras, and our data trails etched out by smart devices. We are witnessing historic times right now Continue Reading …

The current state of politics in the country is probably the most polarised and disruptive it has ever been in this century. As the protests pockmark the landscape of the country, with the young on the forefront, offering the last line of defence against a government overtaking constitutional provisions and rights, the digital fallout is quite intense. It is inevitable that we find ourselves engaged, angry, exhausted at the deaf ears that our arguments and conversations fall on. No matter which side we fall on, there is no denying that we are frustrated — either about the liberal politics that questions the naturalisation of a Hindu nation, or about the unapologetic fundamentalism that sees human life and dignity as disposable in the quest of militant nationalism. These debates are not going to be resolved in the shouting matches online. We are not going to find resolutions to these fundamental ideological divisions with emojis. So, as we rage and subscribe to the outrage express that is the social web, it is important to remember the feminists call that “self-care is a Continue Reading …

Late in the 1990s, when the computer was being democratised and produced for the mass market, there was a new word that was becoming the buzz — digital. What exactly is digital? What does it mean? How do we understand it in our everyday life? These were questions that were often asked, leading to the binaries of analogue-digital, real life — virtual reality, meatspace — cyberspace, etc. The intent and intensity of the digital has been much theorised since then, but the word that strikes right to its core is quantiphilia: The love of counting. If there is only one way of describing the digital, quantiphilia will be it. In his novel Neuromancer (1984), William Gibson, while coining the term cyberspace, had offered it as a “consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators…being taught mathematical concepts” because he knew that the promise of the digital is to be able to comprehend the entire world into knowable, measurable, discrete entities which can be neatly stored in databases that tend to infinity. It is no surprise to us that all our digital Continue Reading …

It has become difficult to talk about fake news. So powerful is its polarising power that any commentary on fake news also immediately gets characterised as fake or not. However, given the amount of misinformation and dangerous disinformation that we are subjected to daily, it is necessary to find a language and story to understand the key conditions of fake news. And I intend to do it today through cat memes — LOL Cat and Hello Kitty — to see if they might help understand what is at stake. LOL Cat, the original meme of the social web, was the first embodiment of what I understand as fake news. At the heart of LOL Cat was a performance of vulgarity and commonness. With its cheeky “I can haz cheezeburgers” captions, LOL Cat played on various stereotypes of class, race, and education. As a meme emerging out of the USA, the riff on cheeseburgers was a reference to the Internet joke that a middle-class American would eat fast-food chain cheeseburgers even when presented with a healthy diet or haute cuisine. The Continue Reading …

The internet is made of mundane things. Be it the obsessive recording of who ate what and what they look like on our social media streams or the continuous transaction of data and money that powers the e-commerce of our click-and-buy times. If anything, the digital streams are a testimony to the absolute banality of our everyday lives. We seem to become counters who track, collect, store, share, and forget the minutiae of our humdrum days, only to start the process all over again. Once in a while, this prosaic production of our life gets punctuated by the appearance of an opinion, an idea, an encounter that shakes us out of our scroll-a-day practices and shakes us into excitement. But this state of excited interest is rare, and often triggered by clickbait headlines and messages crafted with the promise of titillation but the reality of a damp squib. And yet, when it comes to our imagination of the internet, it seems to be filled with nothing but spectacular moments of heroic proportions. It feels like every piece of information that Continue Reading …

Something weird has happened to our lives because of the digital. We have long lamented the fact that our life is being reduced to flattened spectacles mediated by manipulative filters that exacerbate the feeling that everybody else is having adventures of a lifetime while we count it a day well spent if we caught up on the latest show on Netflix and whined to a friend about a potential online date that could also be a catfish. The presentation of life in digital streams is performative, and we have perfected the craft of artfully capturing our lives. The visual predominance has become the default mode of being of our mobile-triggered lives, where every banal moment is potentially viral and presents us as perceptive and quirky and insightfully thoughtful. However, there is another kind of visualisation that has captured my attention lately — the kind that presents people with visuals of themselves. Just look at your smartphone right now and you realise that there is a continued stream of information that it gives you about yourself. Some of this is notifications Continue Reading …

I was checking in for a flight, when the desk manager asked me if I would like to participate in a beta-programme that they are deploying for their frequent flyers. “No more checking-in, no more boarding passes, no more verification queues,” she narrated with a beaming smile. Given the amount of travelling I do, and the continued frustrations of travelling with a passport that is not easily welcome everywhere, I was immediately intrigued. Anything that makes the way to a flight easier, and reduces the variable scrutiny of systemically biased algorithmic checks was welcome. I asked about the programme. It is a biometric facial recognition programme. It recognises my face from the minute I present myself at the airport, and from there on, till I am in the flight, it tracks me, locates me, offers me a visual map of my traces, and gives me seamless mobility, alerting the systems that I am transacting with, that I am pre-approved. I saw some mock-ups, and imagined the ease of no longer fishing out passports and boarding passes at every interaction in Continue Reading …

Why we need to stand by Greta Thunberg and #MeToo activists when they are under attack. (Photo: Reuters) If your social media feeds look anything like mine, you have spent the last couple of weeks smiling, cheering, clapping, and crying at the sound of one name — Greta Thunberg. The 16-year-old from Sweden, who led a global strike to fight for futures, using social media to mobilise hundreds of thousands of children to walk out of their education institutions and demand that their climate futures be protected by negligent governments from callous corporations, has become the poster child of the power of social media. Her speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where she turned to a hall full of world leaders and shamed them for making her this global phenomenon — she, who only wanted to be a child, and grow up happy. In many ways, Thunberg is the delivery of the promise that the worldwide web had made for us in the early 1990s — the promise that the power of the digital web will Continue Reading …