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Spinning the Web Internet and Capitalism. A Sticky Story.
Prof. Robert W. McChesney speaks extensively on the effect of Capitalism on the Internet and how it is changing the World around us. October 2013
www.kindlemag.in
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KINDLE Ideas
Imagination
Dialectics
Editor in Chief: Pritha Kejriwal Managing Editor: Maitreyi Kandoi Senior Editor: Sayan Bhattacharya Web Editor: Shubham Nag Sub Editor: Nidhi Dugar Kundalia Roving Editor: Mukherjee P. Feature Writers: Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, Rimi B. Chatterjee, Saswat Pattanayak, Poornima Joshi, Manash Bhattacharjee, Dipa Sinha, Nitesh Mohanty, Koli Mitra, Saransh Sugandh, Shamya Dasgupta Columnists: Amit Sengupta, Thomas Crowley, Rohit Roy, Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal, Deepa Bhasthi, Neel Adhikari Art Director: Soumik Lahiri Marketing Manager: Priyanka Khandelia Assistant Manager-Marketing: Souvik Sen Finance Executives: Dibyendu Chakraborty, Vishal K Thakur Head - Logistics: Arindam Sarkar Printed at: CDC Printers Pvt Ltd, Tangra Industrial Estate - II (Bengal Pottery), 45 Radhanath Chowdhury Road, Kolkata - 700 015. Distribution: IBH Books & Magazines Distributors Pvt. Ltd. Phone # 022 4049 7401 /02 Email: contact@ibhworld.com A. H. Wheeler & Co. Pvt. Ltd. Phone # 91-532-2261385-8 Email: wheeler_ip@rediffmail.com Vol 4 Issue 07 October 2013 For subscription queries: Write to info@kindlemag.in For advertising, write to us at: advertising@kindlemag.in For marketing alliances, write to us at: alliances@kindlemag.in Owned, printed and published by Pritha Kejriwal on behalf of Ink Publications Pvt Ltd. Printed at CDC Printers Pvt Ltd and published from Kolkata. Ink Publications Pvt Ltd is not responsible for the statements and opinions expressed by authors in their articles/writeups published in ‘Kindle’. ‘Kindle’ does not take any responsibility for returning unsolicited publishing material.
Visit: www.kindlemag.in RNI NO. WBENG/2010/36111 Regd. No. KOL RMS/429/2011-2013
Editor’s Note
S
tanding at the site of the Heidelberg printing press, mixed emotions sweep over, and I wonder if twenty years down the line this factory will still remain. I mentally make a list of which other businesses or profession suffered this technology called the Internet. On a lighter note, one should really rethink if they plan a career as a dictator. The Internet and its social networking sites will eventually pull you down. Arthur C Clarke said in his third law that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And magic it seems to be that tens of hundreds of engineers on the payroll of Google and Facebook and YouTube are employed to do. Syntax magic and algorithm magic. All of us, now products of this technology called Internet. So, what does Google sell? It sells us. Our likes, interests, affiliations, choices, temperaments. Our demographics (registration data), our behavioural data (clickstream). Our personal preferences (like activity), attitudes and interests (survey data), locations (check-ins), opinions (content created), influences (content sharing), search interests (keywords), shopping preferences (transaction data), intentions (email scans). Some of this data is freely offered by us, some inferred by Google. Global surveillance, infrastructural imperialism, yet we believe we are freer, we believe we have more rights, we believe in more democracy.” ‘You’ have freedom of choice, ‘You’ can let yourself be profiled so that ‘You’ receive solicitations from companies that interest ‘You’. ‘You’ could customise your cellphone with a ringtone. The emphasis on ‘You’ however is only a smokescreen. In this process of aggregation, who are you? Who are you to Google, to Amazon? Are you the sum of your consumer preferences and My Space personas? What is your contribution every month?”-Siva Vaidyanathan (The Googlization of everything).
This is not to discount the tremendous potential of the Internet in our everyday lives. The Internet at its best is the most effective dis-intermediary. Take media for example. The gatekeepers of information were the people who could afford to set up a press or a channel and have the resources to run it. Interpretation of information was at their discretion. And the consumers of news had a choice of these limited newspapers or magazines or channels from which to build their opinions upon. With the advent of the Internet, everyone became a reporter. Citizens took to writing their own news, their own stories, not being represented by owners of media - YouTube, Twitter, blogs became their platforms. But as the scope of www expanded, unfortunately as in most markets the hegemony of few players prevailed. As Professor Robert McChesney, Professor of Communication at the University of Illinois, media reform advocate and the author of the book Digital Disconnect, says in his very long interview with Kindle Magazine this month, that the Internet is the greatest creator of economic monopolies in history. So while we make use of the Internet as an integral part of our lives now, it is most important that we be aware. The concern is that a few companies on the Internet will become the sourcing point for all our information. Any technology which has the power to frame our questions as also to answer them could have an altering effect to the way we view the world. How this is a double edged sword, is what we discuss in depth this month in the magazine.
Maitreyi Kandoi, Managing Editor, Kindle Magazine mk@kindlemag.in
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Illustration by Sayandip Sarkar
OPINION
Kissa As the Delhi state elections draw closer, Poornima Joshi trains her spotlight on the chief players and comes back smiling.
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he party that launched many a PM candidate cannot project a chief ministerial candidate in Delhi. The embattled ruling party at the centre finds its only solace where Anna Hazare has dumped his chief lieutenant to conscientiously wield a broom. And even the prophetic tele-brigade is struggling
to make a prediction. Delhi lives up to the expectations of the political capital of a country of paradoxes this year. In the run-up to the provincial elections, the city glitters with surprising possibilities and absurd contrasts. There is the urbane, ageing Shiela Dikshit
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COLUMN: VALLEEWARD
Illustration by Soumik Lahiri
Valleeward
The Senseless Symphony
Protesting Zubin Mehta’s concert in Kashmir is not protesting against music and art. It is about highlighting the bizarreness of a concert that purports to promote peace in a strife torn state while not allowing locals to participate. By Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal.
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Cutting through the Web
Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is turning the internet against democracy charts out the growth of the internet, its evolution and the new debates and crises it opens up for discourses on democracy, freedom and the state. Its author Professor Robert W. McChesney in conversation with Pritha Kejriwal.
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App-ocalypse The bombastic seduction of the apps, the velvety seduction of the apps… a fatal seduction. By Abhimanyu Maheshwari.
2 0 1 3 Artist’s interpretation of the cover of ‘1984’ (1959 Swedish Edition) by George Orwell.
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How Private is your data on Facebook? Data collected by Shubham Nag. Illustrated by Soumik Lahiri.
Let’s go through a few layers to break the deadlock. Or can we?
Changes in Facebook’s default privacy settings Entire Internet
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DATA
All on Facebook Friends of Friends
is applicable
2005
And
2007
28%
Facebook users have never touched their privacy settings.
Share all, almost, of their wall posts with an audience wider than just friends.
are posted on Facebook daily.
Other Data
Likes
Profile Picture
Gender
Wall Posts
Photos
Likes
Other Data
Profile Picture
TO PEOPLE who haven’t touched
their privacy settings on Facebook
2010
1.11 BILLION
Facebook’s current population.
Moreover
3.2 BILLION
LIKES
Gender
2009
13%
and comments
Wall Posts
Photos
Likes
Other Data
Profile Picture
Gender
Wall Posts
Photos
Other Data
Likes
Profile Picture
Gender
Photos
You
Wall Posts
Friends
300 MILLION
Photos are posted on Facebook everyday.
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#Hashing It Out: Democracy and Discourse in Twitterverse. By Koli Mitra
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arlier this year, a feminist meme sprang up on the microblogging site Tumblr. Participants posted messages that began “I need feminism because ” and completed the thought with their personal takes on the issue. A heterosexual man declared he needed feminism because his friends mistook his habit of treating women decently as a ploy to pick up women… or a sign that he was gay. Someone said “I need feminism because we keep confusing objectification of women with liberation of women.” Others addressed workplace discrimination, restrictive gender roles, pervasive sexual violence and harassment, etc. It was hugely popular. A group of antifeminist “men’s rights activists” (MRAs) reacted by launching a syntactically parallel counter-campaign on Twitter. They replaced the word “feminism” with “masculism” in a newly created hashtag: #INeedMasculismBecause.
What unfolded, thanks to the immense viral force of hashtags, points to a new dialectic; a new approach to how people hash out – so to speak – their philosophical disputes. A hashtag (for the uninitiated among us) is a string of text preceded by a pound sign (#) that operates as a label for packets of content on various social networking and microblogging platforms, most notably, Twitter. It’s a simple typographical convention that requires no specialized skill. Anyone posting on such sites can create hashtags and attach them to their messages. Hashtags are searchable and hyperlinked, so anyone interested in the topic described by a hashtag can find posts on that topic grouped together in a streamlined, easy to follow configuration, like a live, continually updating index. At least, that’s the theory. Popular hashtags are highlighted in various ways. On Twitter, frequently used hashtags become “trending topics”
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