ICT and Media II: Mobile Adaptation and New-Generation Telephony in the Media; Ethics and New Media; ICT in Education and Development in India, Online Media and E-Governance; and Animation — Concepts and Techniques

New media raise familiar ethical questions at new speed and scale. Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan's report Information Disorder (2017), for the Council of Europe, gave the standard vocabulary: misinformation is false information shared without intent to harm; disinformation is false information created or shared deliberately to cause harm; malinformation is genuine information shared to cause harm, such as leaking private details. Deepfakes, synthetic video or audio made with artificial intelligence, make fabricated evidence easy to produce. Privacy is threatened by data collection, surveillance and doxxing, the publication of a person's private details to target them; trolling and coordinated harassment, especially of women journalists, silence voices; and algorithms can amplify outrage and bias.

• Verify before publishing, especially user-generated images and video, and label what could not be verified.
• Correct errors visibly; online stories can be changed, so changes should be noted, not hidden.
• Disclose sponsorship and paid influencer content, as ASCI's 2021 guidelines require.
• Protect privacy and the identity of victims and children online as offline; the law on naming applies to posts.
• Be transparent about the use of artificial intelligence in producing content.

Fact-checking has grown into a field of its own. The International Fact-Checking Network, set up at the Poynter Institute in 2015, maintains a code of principles on non-partisanship, transparency of sources, funding and methodology, and open corrections, and several Indian fact-checking organisations are signatories. Media literacy, discussed in Chapter 1, is the audience's side of the same work.

India's use of communication technology for education began with broadcasting, from SITE (1975–76) to the educational channel Gyan Darshan (2000) and EDUSAT (2004), the first satellite dedicated to education. The internet era brought NPTEL (2003) for engineering and science courses from the IITs and IISc, e-PG Pathshala for postgraduate content, the National Digital Library of India, SWAYAM (2017), the national platform for massive open online courses, SWAYAM Prabha DTH channels, DIKSHA (2017) for school teachers and students, and PM eVIDYA (2020), which brought these together when schools closed during the pandemic.

For development and governance, the National e-Governance Plan (2006) set up mission-mode projects and Common Services Centres, village-level kiosks that deliver services; Aadhaar (the UIDAI was set up in 2009) gave a digital identity; Digital India (launched on 1 July 2015) aimed at digital infrastructure, services on demand and digital literacy; BharatNet extends optical fibre to village panchayats; the Unified Payments Interface (2016) made mobile payments ubiquitous; and platforms such as DigiLocker (2015), MyGov (2014) and UMANG (2017) put documents, consultation and services on the phone. Earlier pilots showed the possibilities: Gyandoot (2000), an intranet of village information kiosks in Dhar district of Madhya Pradesh, and Bhoomi, Karnataka's computerisation of land records. Online media, the news websites, portals and citizen-journalism platforms of the internet, carry information about these schemes and scrutinise them, and community media online give local voices a platform. The digital divide, of connectivity, devices, skills and language, and between men and women, limits all of these.

Animation creates the illusion of movement from a sequence of still images shown in rapid succession, relying on the eye and brain's tendency to fuse them, traditionally explained as persistence of vision and more precisely by the phi phenomenon and beta movement. Film runs at 24 frames per second; animators often draw "on twos", one drawing held for two frames, so 12 drawings make a second, and a 10-second sequence at 24 frames per second animated on twos needs 24 × 10 ÷ 2 = 120 drawings. Key animators draw the extreme poses (keyframes) and assistants or software fill the frames between (in-betweening, or tweening). Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston set out the twelve principles of animation in The Illusion of Life (1981): squash and stretch, anticipation, staging, straight-ahead action and pose-to-pose, follow-through and overlapping action, slow in and slow out, arcs, secondary action, timing, exaggeration, solid drawing and appeal.

The history runs from Émile Cohl's Fantasmagorie (1908) and Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) through Disney's Steamboat Willie (1928), with synchronised sound, and Snow White (1937), the first cel-animated feature from Disney, to Pixar's Toy Story (1995). In India the Films Division set up a cartoon unit in 1956, Ram Mohan is often called the father of Indian animation, Bhimsain Khurana's Ek Anek Aur Ekta (1974), shown on Doordarshan, taught national unity through a simple fable, and television series such as Chhota Bheem (2008) built a domestic industry that also serves as an outsourcing centre for international studios. Animation is used well beyond entertainment: in advertising, explainer videos, news graphics, education and data visualisation.