Nikhil Pahwa is an Indian journalist, digital rights activist, and founder of MediaNama, a mobile and digital news portal. He has been a key commentator on stories and debates around Indian digital media companies, censorship and Internet and mobile regulation in India. On the even of India’s general election 2019, Nalaka Gunawardene spoke to him […]
Keynote speech delivered by science writer and digital media analyst Nalaka Gunawardene at the Sri Lanka National IT Conference held in Colombo from 2 to 4 October 2018. Here is a summary of what I covered (PPT embedded below): With around a third of Sri Lanka’s 21 million people using at least one type of […]
When I spoke out on social media recently for the rights of sexual minorities in Sri Lanka, some wanted to know why I cared for these ‘deviants’ – one even asked if I was ‘also one of them’. I didn’t want to dignify such questions with an immediate answer. However, in my mind, it is […]
In this Ravaya column (published on 29 July 2018), I further explore the contours of fake news in Sri Lanka. I point out, with examples, that certain politicians (including national leaders) and senior journalists are actively engaged in creating and/or disseminating myths, misconceptions and fallacies that give rise to fake news. I debunk, with official (police) […]
Even though it is widely practised in most human societies, gossip is much maligned. At best it is seen as frivolous and a waste of time, and at worst, as malicious and anti-social. But not all gossip is bad, and, a growing body of research shows that gossip can be useful in maintaining social norms […]
‘Crowdfunding’ is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising small amounts of money from a large number of people. The idea has been around for a long time, in one way or another, but modern day crowdfunding using digital and web technologies has a history of just two decades. As the Internet […]
Rodney Jonklaas (1925-1989) was a Lankan marine biologist, free diver, SCUBA diver, spearfisherman and underwater photographer. He was one of the pioneer divers in Ceylon, starting soon after the aqualung was invented in the 1940s. He was founder in 1946/7 of the “Reefcombers of Ceylon”, one of the world’s earliest diving clubs. I have written […]
Trends like ultra-nationalistic media, hate speech and fake news have all been around for decades — certainly well before the web emerged in the 1990s. What digital tools and the web have done is to ‘turbo-charge’ these trends. This is the main thrust of this week’s Ravaya column, published on 1 July 2018, where I […]
Today, I was interviewed on video for BBC Sinhala service for my views on hate speech and fake news. Given below is my remarks in Sinhala, excerpts from which are to be used. In summary, I said these phenomena predate social media and the web itself, but cyber space has enabled easier and faster dissemination […]
Fake News is not new. The phenomenon has been around, in one form or another, for decades! Many of us in the global South have grown up amidst intentionally fake news stories in our media, some of it coming from governments, no less. Fake News is merely a symptom of a wider and deeper crisis.It […]
Some say that blogging is in decline and claim that the days are numbered for this art of web-based writing and sharing of all kinds of content. But not (yet?) in Sri Lanka’s local languages of Sinhala and Tamil, where vibrant blogospheres exist, sustaining their own subcultures and dynamics. In this article (in Sinhala) written […]
Some say that blogging is in decline and claim that the days are numbered for this art of web-based writing and sharing of all kinds of content. But not (yet?) in Sri Lanka’s local languages of Sinhala and Tamil, where vibrant blogospheres exist, sustaining their own subcultures and dynamics. In this article (in Sinhala) written […]
I was a participant and speaker at the 11th Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum (GMF), held in Bonn, Germany, from 11 to 13 June 2018. Around 2,000 media professionals and experts from over 100 countries gathered at the World Conference Centre Bonn (WCCB) for the event, themed on ‘Global Inequalities’. Across many plenaries and parallel […]
In my Ravaya column published in the printed edition of 6 May 2018, I look back at the long and illustrious career of Sri Lanka’s grand old man of the cinema, Lester James Peries (1919-2018) who died last week. As others assess his major contributions to the Sinhala cinema and in evolving an Asian cinema, […]
Op-ed published in Ceylon Today broadsheet newspaper on Sunday, 1 April 2018: Sri Lanka’s RTI Glass is Slowly Filling Up by Nalaka Gunawardene In June 2016, Sri Lanka became the 108th country in the world to pass a law allowing citizens to demand information from the government. After a preparatory period of six months, citizens […]
This is an annotated Sinhala language adaptation of Facebook’s Community Standards as they stood on 25 March 2018. Note this is not a verbatim translation and also not an officially sanctioned translation. It has been adapted and annotated as a public service by Nalaka Gunawardene, new media analyst and activist. ෆේස්බුක් පිවිසෙන සැවොම පිළිපැදිය […] ...
#Privacy online is not absolute but relative: within that, we can & should determine how much of our personal data we want to give out when using #SocialMedia. Beware of third party apps riding @Facebook! These sum up my remarks in an interview for the evening English news bulletin of TV Derana, currently Sri Lanka’s […]
This article, in Sinhala, appeared in Irida Lakbima broadsheet newspaper on Sunday, 18 March 2018 and is based on an interview with myself on Sri Lanka’s Social Media block that lasted from 7 to 15 March 2018. I discuss Facebook’s Community Standards and the complaints mechanism currently in place, and the difficulties that non-English language […]
Sri Lanka’s first ever social media blocking lasted from 7 to 15 March 2018. During that time, Facebook and Instagram were completely blocked while chat apps WhatsApp and Viber were restricted (no images, audio or video, but text allowed). On 7 March 2018, the country’s telecom regulator, Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (TRCSL), ordered all telecom operators […]