The Centre for Internet and Society
http://editors.cis-india.org
These are the search results for the query, showing results 11 to 19.
On Fooling Around: Digital Natives and Politics in Asia
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/digital-natives-and-politics-in-asia
<b>Youths are not only actively participating in the politics of its times but also changing the way in which we understand the political processes of mobilisation, participation and transformation, writes Nishant Shah. The paper was presented at the Digital Cultures in Asia, 2009, at the Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.</b>
<h3><strong>Abstract</strong></h3>
<p>As an increasing population in Asia experiences a lifestyle mediated by digital technologies, there is also a correlated concern about the young Digital Natives constructing their identities and expressions through a world of incessant consumption, while remaining apathetic to the immediate political and social needs of their times. Governments, educators, civil society theorists and practitioners, have all expressed alarm at how the Digital Natives across emerging information societies are so entrenched in the rhetoric, vocabulary and practice of consumption, that they have a disconnect with the larger external reality and are often contained within digital deliriums. They discard the emergent communication and expression trends, mobilization and participation platforms, and processes of cultural production, as trivial or often unimportant. Such a perspective is embedded in a non-changing view of the political landscape and do not take into account that the youth's consumption of globalised ideas and usage of digital technologies, has led to a new kind of political revolution, which might not subscribe to earlier notions of change but nevertheless offer possibilities for great social transformation.</p>
<h3>Context: Techno-Social Identities</h3>
<div>It was the beginning of the 1990’s that ushered in the digital globalisation in Asia and emerging information societies were experiencing a moment of significant socio-political and econo-cultural transition. Many countries in South and East Asia restructured their developmental agenda to accommodate the neo-liberal paradigm that opened their economic and cultural capital to the globalised world markets (Roy; 2005). Unlike in the West, especially in the United States of North America and North-Western Europe, where the internet technologies developed in hallowed spaces of academic and government research, conceptualised in an idealised ethos of open source cultures, free speech and shared knowledges (Himanen; 2001), the emergence of digital ICTs were signifiers of a certain economic mobility, globalised aesthetic of incessant consumption, availability of lifestyle-choices and a reconfiguring of the State-Citizen relationship.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>As different countries in Asia invested in the physical infrastructure of ICTs and widespread access to cyberspatial technologies, they also posited the figure of a techno-social citizen-subject who was caught in a double bind: On the one hand, these new subjects were the wealth of the nations, providing a base for outsourcing and back-processing industries, using their skills with digital technologies to aid the State’s aspirations of economic progress and development. With the digital technologies appearing as the panacea for the various problems of illiteracy, population explosion and ethnic/regional conflicts that have marked many Asian countries in the second half of the Twentieth Century, these new subjects were looked upon as the pall-bearers who would usher in the much desired economic development and socio-cultural reform in these emerging information societies. On the other hand, the ability of these techno-social subjects to transcend their local, to circumvent State authority and regulation, and adapt to a new era of economic and cultural consumption, posited a huge problem for these States that strove to contain the spills of an economic decision into the domains of the social, cultural and the political (Bagga, et al; 2005).</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Among the populations who were actively (or, as is often the case, unwittingly) embodying these changes, were the Digital Natives – younger children and youth who have embraced digital technologies and tools as central to their every-day lives and sense of the self – who used (and abused) these technologised spaces in unpredictable and creative ways beyond, and often against, the authority of the State (Shah; 2007) . This particular identity has raised a lot of concern from different authorities like the government, the educators, the legislators and policy makers, and even civil society practitioners and theorists. Most governments had their initial responses to these Digital Native identities as rooted in paranoia and pathologisation. The cyberspatial matrices are looked at with suspicion as creating a world of the forbidden, the dirty and the dangerous. Public debates over pornography, obscenity, need to control and censor the unabashed fantasies that the cyberspaces were catering to, and a call to govern, administer and contain these spaces (and consequently, the people occupying them), have riddled through information societies around the globe.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>The many anxieties that have surfaced from parents, teachers, interventionists and policy makers, have led to a global industry that is aimed at keeping the children and youth safe from the ‘ill-effects’ of being online. The responses have been varied and diverse: Radical measures from heavy censorship and regulation of all information accessed through the digital spaces to opening up de-addiction and rehabilitation centres; Strong anti-piracy and pornography drives to forming strict legislation on digital crimes; Extraordinary steps to educate the young people about the perils and pit-falls of internet usage to actual policies dissuade internet usage by regulating the physical spaces of access and the promise of dire punishments for ‘abuse’.</div>
<div><br />Providing a litany of these anxieties – each made unique by the differential and contextual experience of digital technologies across regions and societies – can be a daunting and eventually a futile exercise because the landscape of digital technologies and spaces is extremely varied and fluid and each new crisis leads to the emergence of a new set of problems. However, there are certain common tensions and uncontested assumptions that run through these anxieties, which need to be understood and examined. It is the intention of this paper to extrapolate these less visible anxieties with a particular focus on the techno-social identity more popularly referred to as Digital Natives.</div>
<div> </div>
<h3>Misunderstood & Misrepresented</h3>
<div>The term ‘Digital Natives’ (Prensky, 2001) is slowly becoming ubiquitous in its usage amongst scholars and activists working in the youth-technology paradigm, especially in emerging Information Societies. The phrase is used to differentiate a particular generation – generally agreed upon as a generation that was born after 1980 – who has an unprecedented (and often inexplicable) relationship with the information technology gadgets. It is a phrase used to make us aware of the fact that these people are everywhere: On the roads taking pictures on their mobile phones and uploading them on their blogs and photo-streams; In public transport, in their own individually created islands where they listen to music and furiously typing text message their friends; In schools and universities, multitasking, preparing a classroom presentation while chatting with friends and keeping track of their online gaming avatars; In offices, glued in with equal passion on to dating and social networking sites as the geek mailing list that they moderate; In homes and bedrooms, uploading the most private and intimate details of their lives (or becoming subjects to other peoples’ online activities) on live cam feeds and audio and video podcasts; In our imaginations, sometimes cracking into our machines, at others, helping us remove that malware, and at yet others, appearing as flesh-and-body familiar strangers just a click away.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>All of these are the common sense characteristics attributed to Digital Natives. These are all people born into globalised markets and liberal economies; into accelerated communication and digital representations. And they have skills (and choices) to navigate through the increasingly mediated and digitised technosocial<a name="fr1" href="#fn1">[1]</a> environments that we live in. Most of the stories around these Digital Natives, take on the expected tones of euphoria and paranoia. On the one hand, are the unabashed celebrations of this new digital identity and the possibilities and potentials it offers, and on the other are concerns and alarms about the lack of structures which can make meaning or shape these identities in meaningful and constructive ways which can contribute to a certain vision of democracy, equality, community building and freedom. Both these accounts often contain the Digital Native in geo-political (North-Western, developed countries) and socio-cultural (Educated, affluent, empowered), and do not provide much insight into the incipient potentials of social transformation and political participation with the rise of the Digital Native identity.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>There are strident voices that knell the toll of parting day when it comes to Digital Natives. There is a general outcry from scholars that the typical Digital Native is basically dumb. Mark Bauerlein (2008) calls them ‘The Dumbest Generation’ that is jeopardising our future. He paints them as being in a state of constant distraction made of multi-tasking and gadgets that demand their attention. Psychiatrist Edward Hallowell suggests that they exhibit, because of their scattered engagement with technology, symptoms that look like attention deficit disorders. The educators in class lament about how this is a copy + paste culture that refuses to read and write or even think on their own (Bennett et al, 2008) as Digital natives increasingly depend on machines and networks to do their work for them.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="pullquote">In 2008, China recorded its 100 millionth internet user and also witnessed the death of a 13-year-old Digital Native, who, after two days of non-stop gaming, jumped off an elevator to ‘meet another character from his game’ (China Times; 2008) – the gaming environment leading him to a state of hypnosis where he could not make a distinction between his physical reality and his digital fantasy. Immediately following this, China started its first internet rehabilitation clinics, identifying internet addiction disorder (IAD) as significantly affecting young people’s mental growth as well as their social and interpersonal skills. Dan Tapscott has announced the birth of the “Screenagers” who are unable to look beyond their need for entertainment and personal gratification, all at their fingertips as they live their lives on the Infobahn.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>It is in the nature of the design of trust online (Nevejan, 2008) that the Digital Native in his/her transactions becomes the centre of his/her own universe. The recent explosion of news feeds on sites like Facebook, or the use of Twitter to create social networks, or blogging which is often contained in echo-chambers (as demonstrated by Howard Dean’s political campaign in the USA, 2004), often gives the young Digital Native an inflated sense of the self. The tools that the Digital Natives have for finding people who think exactly like them lead to a sense of intense self gratification (Shah, 2005) and also provide a dangerous outlet for violence to themselves and others, as they find validation for their actions within that group without facing any protest or conflict – what Loren Coleman (2007) calls the ‘copycat effect’. The phenomenon of younger users seeking internet celebrity status by engaging in dangerous activities like confessionals, recording and sharing of sexual escapades, bullying and exposing themselves in ridiculous situations to get attention and limelight, have raised concern among parents and educators (Gasser and Palfrey; 2007).</div>
<div> </div>
<div>This list is by no means exhaustive but gives a clear indication of how the Digital Natives are contained in the matrices of the internet in their representations and are painted as irresponsible and irreverent individuals who appear as pranksters, jesters, and clowns, carrying with them, also the darker sides of cruel humour, dark deeds and sinister pranks which need to be regulated and censored – to save the society from this growing menace, and indeed, to save them from themselves.</div>
<div> </div>
<h3>Pranksters, Jesters and Clowns?</h3>
<div>It is easy, from such perspectives, to not only demonise (thus enabling regulation and control) of Digital Native identities but also ignoring their new aesthetics, politics and mechanisms of participation and change as trivial or ‘merely cultural’. There have been many instances, over the years, where each new technology and technologised space of cultural production has been treated as frivolous, infantile or faddy. Let me take this discussion through three case-studies where Digital Native spaces, engagements and activities have been perceived as juvenile or foolish to examine this particular presumption of trivialness that is often pegged on the Digital Natives and their activities. Each Case-Study has been structured in two parts: the first gives a short understanding of the technologised phenomenon and space, the second provides a brief summary of the event.</div>
<div> </div>
<h3><strong>Flash (Mob) in a Pan from India</strong></h3>
<div><strong>Flash-mobs</strong>: Organise, congregate, act, disperse – that is the anatomy of a flash mob. Howard Rheingold, in his book titled Smart Mobs, suggests that the people who make up smart mobs co-operate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities. Their mobile devices connect them with other information devices in the environment as well as with other people's telephones. Dirt-cheap microprocessors embedded in everything from box tops to shoes are beginning to permeate furniture, buildings, neighbourhoods, products with invisible intercommunicating smartifacts. When they connect the tangible objects and places of our daily lives with cyberspace, handheld communication media mutate into wearable remote control devices for the physical world (Rheingold, 2001). The flash-mobs, along with the now ubiquitous terms like viral-networking and crowd-sourcing are the most significant examples of the ways in which the digital networks can mobilise people towards a common cause within the digital matrices as well as in the physical world.</div>
<div> </div>
<div><strong>The story</strong>: India’s first recorded flash-mob started with a website asking for volunteers who wanted to ‘have some serious fun’. On the 3rd of October, when several cell phones rang and email inboxes found an email that briefly chalked out the time and space for a venue – a Flash site. Text messages were sent to all the members who had volunteered by anonymous agencies. And then at 5:00 p.m., the next day, about a 100 participants assembled at a mall called Crossroads.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>At the Crossroads Flash-Mob, the mobsters screamed at the top of their voices and sold imaginary shares. They danced. They all froze still in the middle of their actions. And then without as much as a word, after two minutes of historic histrionics, they opened their umbrellas and dispersed, leaving behind them a trail of bewilderment and confusion. This was India’s first recorded flash-mob. People who never knew each other, did not have any largely political purpose in mind and did not really intend to extend relationships, got together to perform a set of ridiculous actions at Crossroads. This first flash mob sparked off many different flash mobs all around the nation – most of them marking out spaces like multiplexes, shopping malls, gaming parlours, body shops, large commercial roads and shopping complexes as their flash sites.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>One of the most celebrated accounts of the flash-mob was by Bijoy Venugopal, a serious blogger and writer (Venugopal; October 2003), who also reiterated the fact that the intention of participation was to have some ‘serious fun.’ Subsequent experience-sharing by other members of the flash-mobs also endorsed the idea that the flash-mob was like an extension of online gaming or the tenuous digital communities which are a part of the lifestyle choices and social networking for an increasing number of people in the large urban wi-fi centres of India. The Flash-mob seemed to carry with it all the elements that digital cyberspaces have to offer – a sense of tentative belonging, a grouping of people who seek to network with each other based on similar interests, a growing sense of a need to ‘enchant’ the otherwise quickly mechanised world around us, and an exciting space of novel experiences and unmonitored, pseudonymous (except for the physical presence) fun.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>The flash-mob gained huge media coverage and local buzz and was talked about and debated upon quite furiously in popular media. The organisers of the flash-mobs became instant celebrities and were questioned repeatedly about the reasons for organising the flash-mob. The answer was always unwavering – the organisers insisted that the flash-mobs were a way for them to instil fun and novelty in the very hurried life in Mumbai. On the website, Rohit Tikmany, one of the original organisers, very passionately argues:</div>
<div> </div>
<blockquote>
<div>We are not making any statement here - we are not protesting anything - we are not a revolution, a movement or an agitation. Our purpose (if any) is solely to have fun… None of us is here for anything except fun. We will not have any sponsors (covert or overt) and we will never respond to any commercial/political/religious influences. (Tikmany, 2003)</div>
</blockquote>
<div> </div>
<div>There was a particular and specific disavowal of the ‘political’. The organisers went out of their way to convince that they do not have any political cause that they endorse, that they are not affiliated with any socio-political organisations or parties in the city, and that their actions were guided only by the desire to have some fun and games. The popular media painted it as a fad that made its point about internet mobilisation but was nothing more than a flash in a pan. Initial responses to the flash-mobsters painted them as clowns – a bunch of young people having a bit of fun. It came as a particular shock, in the face of this celebratory mode of looking at flash-mobs and the composition of the crowd (largely upper class, English speaking, Educated, and implicated in the digital circuits of globalised consumption), when the flash-mobs came to be banned in Mumbai and then around the country, as ‘a serious threat the safety and security of the public’ and offering ‘unfavourable conditions of danger’ in the city.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Flash-mobs have been recorded around the globe, for different reasons and to fulfil varied socio-political ambitions. However, most of them have been explicitly for fun. Tapio Makela at the Tempare University, Finland, suggests that flash-mobs are indeed the first real-time digital gaming experience that the internet can provide us with. And yet, flash-mobs are being regulated in almost all emerging Information Societies. While the political rhetoric of unsupervised mobilisation can be understood easily, what lies beneath it is a much more interesting story. For emerging information societies in the world, the digital technologies have a much more significant role to play in economic development and creation of global infrastructure. Most governments have invested highly in the creation of techno-social skill based identities and have a clear idea of the ‘correct’ usage of technology. The flash-mobs present a situation where the ‘ideal’ citizens who should be engaging with these technologies to enhance the labour markets and augment the nation’s efforts at restructuring in global times, are engaging in apparently frivolous activities which are aimed at self gratification and fun. Flash-mobs, through their aesthetic of irreverence and fun, also present a space for criticism and political negotiation to the Digital Natives, who, while they might not be equipped to engage with traditional channels of politics, are now finding ways by which to make their opinions and expressions heard.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>The Flash-mob in Mumbai, for example, builds upon a much richer contextual local history of politics and access. Crossroads, the flash-site, was also the first American Super-Mall in India. In 2001, when the mall opened, it was restrictive in its access, where it demanded the curious onlooker to either pay an entry fee of 50 Indian Rupees or be in possession of a Platinum Credit Card or a Cell phone to enter the mall. The idea was that only a certain kind of citizenship was welcome in this consumerist heaven. It was presumed that people who do not come from a class that can afford to purchase things in the mall might not know how to behave in the mall. A public interest litigation suit against the mall soon revoked these conditions of access and announced the mall as a public space of consumption. However, the lineage of the restrictive conditions that the mall opened with, resonates through the local knowledge systems. The first flash-mob at Crossroads, even though it was ‘fun’, managed to provide a critique of the new class based urban society that global India is building. Ironically, the people who constituted that flash-mob and managed to turn the mall into a place of total chaos for the brief performance were the ‘desirable’ people for the mall. Such a critique, while it might not be overtly articulated for different reasons, still manages to surface once the contextual histories of these events are produced.</div>
<div> </div>
<h3><strong>10 Legendary Obscene Beasts from China</strong></h3>
<div><strong>User Generated Knowledge sites</strong>: The world of knowledge production was never as shaken as it was with the emergence of the Wikipedia – a user generated knowledge production system, where anybody who has any knowledge, on almost anything in the world, can contribute to share it with countless users around the world. The camps around Wikipedia are fairly well divided: there are those who swear by it, and there are those who swear against it. There are scholars, activists and lobbyists who celebrate the democratisation of knowledge production as the next logical evolutionary step to the democratic access to knowledge. They appreciate the wisdom of crowds and revel in the joy that in the much discussed Nature magazine experiment, the number of errors in Wikipedia and its biggest opponent, Encyclopaedia Britannica, were almost the same. And then there are those who think of the Wikipedia and other such peer knowledge production and sharing systems as erroneous, unreliable and a direct result of collapsing standards that the vulgarisation of knowledge has succumbed to in the age where information has become currency. Add to this the hue and cry from academics around the globe who lament falling research standards as the copy+paste generations (Vaidhyanathan; 2008) in classrooms skim over subjects in Wikipedia rather than analysing and studying them in detail from those hallowed treasuries of knowledge – reference books.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>As can be expected, the questions about the veracity, verifiability, trustworthiness and integrity of Wikipedia and other such user generated knowledge sharing sites (including YouTube, Flickr, etc.) are carried on in sombre tones by zealots who are devoted to their beliefs. However, the one question that remains unasked, in the discussion of these sites, is the question of what purpose it might serve beyond the obvious knowledge production exercise.</div>
<div> </div>
<div><strong>The Story</strong>: In China, where the government exerts great control over regulating online information, Wikipedia had a different set of debates which would not feature in the more liberal countries – the debates were around what would be made accessible to a Wikipedia user from China and what information would be blanked out to fit China’s policy of making information that is ‘seditious ‘and disrespectful’, invisible. After the skirmishes with Google, where the search engine company gave in to China’s demands and offered a more censored search engine that filtered away results based on sensitive key-words and issues, Wikipedia was the next in line to offer a controlled internet knowledge base to users in China.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>However, another user-generated knowledge site, more popular locally and with more stringent self-regulating rules than Wikipedia, became the space for political commentary, satire, protest and demonstration against the draconian censorship regimes that China is trying to impose on its young users. The website Baidu Baike (pinyin for Baidu Encyclopaedia), became popular in 2005 and was offered by the Chinese internet search company Baidu. With more than 1.5 million Chinese language articles, Baidu has become a space for much debate and discussion with the Digital Natives in China. Offered as a home-grown response to Wikipedia, Baidu implements heavy ‘self-censorship to avoid displeasing the Chinese Government’ (BBC; 2006) and remains dedicated to removing ‘offensive’ material (with a special emphasis on pornographic and political events) from its shared space.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>It is in this restrictive regime of information sharing and knowledge production, that the Digital Natives in China, introduced the “10 legendary obscene beasts” meme which became extremely popular on Baidu. Manipulating the Baidu Baike’s potential for users to share their knowledge, protestor’s of China’s censorship policy and Baidu’s compliance to it, vandalised contributions by creating humorous pages describing fictitious creatures, with names vaguely referring to Chinese profanities, with homophones and characters using different tones.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>The most famous of these creations was Cao Ni Ma (Chinese: 草泥马), literally "Grass Mud Horse", which uses the same consonants and vowels with different tones for the Chinese language profanity which translates into “Fuck Your Mother” cào nǐ mā (肏你妈) . This mythical animal belonging to the Alpaca race had dire enemies called héxiè (河蟹), literally translated as “river crabs”, very close to the word héxié (和谐) meaning harmony, referring to the government’s declared ambition of creating a “harmonious society” through censorship. The Cao Ni Ma, has now become a popular icon appearing in videos distributed on YouTube, in fake documentaries, in popular Chinese internet productions, and even in themed toys and plushies which all serve as mobilising points against censorship and control that the Chinese government is trying to control.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>However, the reaction from those who do not understand the entire context is, predictably, bordering on the incredulous. Most respondents on different blogs and meme sites, think of these as mere puns and word-plays and juvenile acts of vandalism. The Chinese monitoring agencies themselves failed to recognise the profane and the political intent of these productions and hence they survived on Baidupedia, to become inspiring and iconic symbols of the slow and steady protest against censorship and the right to information act in China. Following these brave acts, Baidu’s user base also experimented very successfully with well-formed parodies and satires, opening up the first spaces in modern Chinese history, for political criticism and negotiation.<a name="fr2" href="#fn1">[2]</a> What is discarded or overlooked as jest or harmless pranks, are actually symptomatic of a new generation using digital tools and spaces to revisit what it means to be politically active and engaged. The 10 obscene legendary creatures, like the flash-mobs, can be easily read as juvenile fun and the actions of a youth that is quickly losing its connection with the immediate contemporary questions. However, a contextual reading combined with a dismantling of the “Digital Native in a bubble” syndrome, can lead to a better understanding of the new aesthetic of social transformation and political participation – one which is embedded in the growing aesthetic of fun, irreverence, and playfulness.</div>
<div> </div>
<h3><strong>A 32 Year Old Dancing Global Nomad</strong></h3>
<div>Context: The aesthetic of irreverence, of playfulness and of exuberant joy is perhaps the best demonstrated by the third case-study which deals with user generated content and sharing sites like YouTube and Blip TV or social networking sites like Facebook and Livejournal. With the easy availability of digital technologies of production – portable laptops and digital cameras, PDAs enabled with phones and multi-media services, webcams and microphones – and tools to share and exchange these productions, there has been an unprecedented amount of digital cultural production which has propelled what we now call the Web 2.0 explosion. There has been much criticism about how we are building a junkyard of digital information. Videos of cats and hamsters dancing, inane audio and video podcasts documenting personal anecdotes and opinions, blogs that publish everything from favourite recipes to sexual escapades, and social networking sites that map rising networks, all add to the immense amount of data that dwells in cyberspace. Questions of data mining, of data redundancy are coupled with alarms of the ‘infantile’ uses of technology have emerged in recent debates around this user generated content. Governments are also battling with problems of piracy, hate-speech, bullying and fundamentalism that have found pervasive channels through these platforms and networks.</div>
<div> </div>
<div><strong>The Story</strong>: In the middle of celebrity hamsters (Hampster the Hamster), popular dancing babies, and parodies of pop stars, there was one particular internet celebrity who is famous, because nobody knows where he is going to dance next. “Where the Hell is Matt?” is a viral video which shot to fame first in 2006, which features Matt Harding, a video game designer from America, who performs a singularly identifiable dance routine in front of various popular destinations in different countries around the world. It started off as a friend recording Matt Harding doing a peculiar dance in Vietnam became popular on the internet and became one of the most popular videos on cyberspace, with his second video released in 2008, viewed 19,860,041 times on YouTube as on 31st March 2009.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Harding has now become a celebrity, featuring on TV talk shows, guest lecturing at universities, and is brand ambassador to a couple of global brands. He is now, also featured dancing on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day website under the title “Happy People Dancing on Planet Earth”, claiming that it shows humans worldwide sharing a joy of dancing. Unlike the flash-mobs and the Baidupedia instances, Where The Hell is Matt? does not have any overt political position or agenda. It has not entered into a condition of strife or struggle with any authoritative regimes or systems of conflict. And yet, what Harding has managed, through his ‘pranks’ , is to create a series of videos which have now come to embody values of cultural diversity, tolerance and universal joy. Instead of making serious speeches, petitions or demonstrations, through his prankster image, Matt Harding has become the unofficial ambassador of peace and harmony around the globe, being discussed avidly by anybody who sees him, with a smile.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>One can either ignore this viral video as a short-lived meme that will soon be forgotten by the next dancing sensation. Even if it might be true, the impact that the “Where the Hell is Matt?” videos have created is significant. When Matt sarcastically said at Entertainment Gathering, that his videos were a hoax, that he was an actor and the videos were an exercise in animatronic puppets and video editing, he had everybody from fans on blogs to new reporters on television responding to it – some often with outrage at being ‘fooled’ by such morphing. Harding revealed his ‘hoax about a hoax’ at the Macworld convention to great amusement. While Matt’s dancing pranks might indeed be forgotten by the next big thing, it is still a fruitful exercise to read it as symptomatic of a much larger redefinition of notions of political participation and social transformation that the Digital Natives and their technology-mediated environments are bringing about.</div>
<div> </div>
<h3>Digital Natives: Causes, Pauses</h3>
<div>Running common, through all these three stories, in popular discourse as well as in academic scholarship, is the presumption of frivolity and non-seriousness that misses out on the much larger contexts of socio-political change. The youth have always been at the forefront of social transformation and political participation. The youth, traditionally, has also had an intimate relationship with new technologies of cultural production, producing influential aesthetics through experimentation and innovation. A brief look at the socio-political history of technologies, shows us that the young who grow up with certain technologies as central to their mechanics of life and living, have led to a reconfiguring of their role and function in the society. The emergence of the print culture, for example, led to the energising of the public spheres in Europe, where young people with access to education and books, could participate and restructure their immediate socio-political environments. Cinematic realism has had its heyday as the tool for political mobilisation through representing the voice of the underprivileged communities. The expansion of the tele-communication networks have led to the rise and fall of governments while changing the face of socio-political and economic activities.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>It is not as if these technologies were without their own concerns, questions and doubts. However, most of these anxieties have been successfully resolved through experience, experiment and analysis. Such practices and communities have Moreover, the promise and the potential of this youth-technology engagement have always surpassed the ensuing anxiety.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>With the Digital Natives, as a small percentage of the world’s population engages with technologies and tools that are quickly gaining currency and popularity, there seems to be a cacophony of alarms and anxieties which seem to have no scope for resolution or respite. And this alarm seems to be louder and more anxious than ever before because it marks a disconnect of the Digital Natives from the role that youth-technology relationships has borne through history – that the Digital Natives are in a state of apathy when it comes to engaging in processes of social transformation and political mobilisation and prefer to stay in isolated bubbles of consumerism and entertainment. This particular accusation that is levelled at the Digital Natives, if true, is not only alarming but also bodes dire fortunes for the whole world as a new generation refuses to engage with questions of politics, governance and transformation outside of the realm of the economic and the personal. This particular disconnect amplifies the other anxieties – moral anxieties around pornography and sexuality, ethical anxieties about plagiarism and piracy, intellectual anxieties about knowledge production and research – because the re-assurance that the Digital Natives will augment the processes of positive social transformation and fruitful political participation, is perceived as lost.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Moreover, unlike earlier technologies, the youth is not being guided into the use of digital technologies but are actually spearheading the development, consumption and rise of these technologies. There is a strong reversal of the power structure, where the digital migrants and settlers have to depend upon the Digital Natives to traverse the terrain of the digital environments. The Digital Natives are in a uniquely singular position where, due to the economic and global restructuring of the world, their world-view and ideas are gaining more currency and visibility than those belonging to previous generations. However, the adults who enter the world of the Digital Natives, insist on viewing them through certain misapplied prisms:</div>
<div> </div>
<div><strong>Difference without change</strong>: These stories or anecdotal data almost always gives us a sense of marked difference of identity in an unchanging world. The Digital Native remains a category or identity which remains to be understood in its difference to integrate it into a world vision that precedes them. The difference is invoked only to emphasise the need for continuity from one generation to another; and thus making a call to ‘rehabilitate’ this new generation into earlier moulds of being.</div>
<div> </div>
<div><strong>The social construction of loss</strong>: A common intention of these stories is to mourn a loss. Each new technology has always been accompanied by a nostalgia industry that immediately recreates a pre-technologised, innocent world that was simpler, better, fairer, and easier to live in. Similarly, the Digital Native identity is premised on multiple losses<a name="fr3" href="#fn3">[3]</a> : loss of childhood, loss of innocence, loss of control, loss of privacy etc. Predicated on this list, is the specific loss of political participation and social transformation; a loss of the youth as the political capital of our digital futures.</div>
<div> </div>
<div><strong>Trivialising the realm of the Cultural</strong>: The third is that these anecdotes of celebration and fear, mark the Digital Native’s actions and practices as confined to some “My bubble, My space” personal/cultural private world of consumption which, when they do connect to larger socio-political phenomena, is accidental. Moreover, they concentrate on the activities and the immediate usage/abuse of technology rather than concentrating on the potentials that these tools and interactions have for the future. They paint the Digital Native as without agency, solipsistic, and in the ‘pointless pursuit of pleasure’, thus dismissing their cultural interactions and processes as trivial and residing in indulgent consumption and personal gratification.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Such perspectives and analytical impulses are a result of the pertinent and influential research methods and disciplinary baggage within contemporary cybercultures studies. Much of the imagination of the Digital Natives carries the baggage of false dichotomies and binaries of discourse around technologically mediated identities. Within cybercultures studies, as well as in earlier interdisciplinary work on digital internets, there has been an explicit and now an implied division of the physical and the virtual. The virtual seems to be a world only loosely anchored in the material and physical reality, and almost seems to be at logger heads with the real in producing its own hyper-visual reality. These distinctions, though not often invoked, are present in different imaginations of the Digital Natives. They seem to reside in virtual worlds producing a ‘disconnect’ from their everyday reality. The alternative public spheres of speech and expression created by the rise of the blogosphere and peer-to-peer networking sites seem to reside only within the digital domain. The frenzied cultural production and consumption on sites like YouTube and Second Life are contained within digital deliriums. Similarly, when attention is paid to Digital Natives and their activities, it is confined to what they do, inhabit, consume and produce online, often forgetting their embodied presence circumscribed by different contexts.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>The notion of contexts, as it is relevant and important to understand techno-social identities, is even more crucial when talking about Digital Natives. Contextualised understanding of their environments, histories, and engagement help us to realise that Digital Native is not a universal identity. Even though the technologies that they use are often global in nature, and the tools and gadgets they employ are shared across borders, the way a digital native identity is constructed and experienced is different with different contexts. As we see, in the case of the flash-mobs and the Baidupedia, the digital native, especially when it comes to social transformation and political participation, is a fiercely local and context based identity and community. It is because of this, that Ethan Zuckerman’s Cute Cat Theory (2005) actually makes sense – that the Digital Natives, when they do utilise digital tools for social transformation or mobilisation, will not go in search for new tools. Instead, they will use the existing platforms and spaces that they are already using to share pictures of cute cats across the globe. The idea of a context based Digital Native identity also leads me to suggest two things to conclude this paper: The first, that Digital Natives are not merely people who are using new tools and technologies to augment the ideas of change and participation that an earlier, development-centric generation has grown up with. By introducing and experimenting with their aesthetic of fun, playfulness and irreverence, they are re-visiting the terrain of what it means to be political and often embedding their politics into seemingly inane or fruitless cultural productions, which create sustainable conditions of change. The second, that the Digital Natives, while they seem to be a different generation and having a unique technology-human relationship, are not really different when it comes to envisioning the role of youth-technology paradigm in the society. What is really different, with this young generation of active, interested and engaged people, is that their local movements and actions are globally shared and accessed, thus forging, perhaps in unprecedented ways, international and cross-cultural communities of support, help and interest. Moreover, these communities subscribe to a new paradigm and vocabulary of socio-political change which is often tied to their every-day actions of entertainment, leisure, networking and cultural production, which provide the potential for the next big change that the Digital Natives set themselves to.</div>
<div> </div>
<hr />
<p><br />[<a name="fn1" href="#fr1">1</a>]. The term ‘techno-social’, coined by Arturo Escobar, refers to a social identity mediated by technology. It puts special emphasis that the digital and physical environments need to be seen in segue with each other rather than disconnected as is often the case in cybercultures and technology studies.</p>
<p>[<a name="fn2" href="#fr2">2</a>].A more serious political satire that moves beyond just punning and avoiding censorship was found in the now-deleted entry for revolutionary hero Wei Guangzheng (伟光正, taken from 伟大, 光荣, 正确, "great, glorious, correct"). An excerpt from it is included here for sampling.</p>
<p class="discreet"><strong>Wei Guangzheng<br /></strong>Comrade Wei Guangzheng is a superior product of natural selection. In the course of competition for survival, because of certain unmatched qualities of his genetic makeup, he has a great ability to survive and reproduce, and hence Wei Guangzheng represents the most advanced state of species evolution. Here is the evolution of Wei Guangzheng's thinking: Since the day of his birth, comrade Wei Guangzheng established a guiding ideology for the people's benefit, and in the course of connecting it with the real circumstances of his beloved Sun Kingdom, a process of repeated comparisons that involved the twists and turns of campaigns of encirclement and suppression, his ideology finally realized a historic leap forward and generated two major theoretic achievements. The first great theoretic leap was the idea of leading a handful of people to take up arms to cause trouble, rebellion, and revolution in order to build a brave new world, and to successfully seize power. This was the "spear ideology." The second great theoretic leap was a theory, with Sun Kingdom characteristics, in which Wei Guangzheng was unswervingly upheld as leader and the people were forever prevented from standing up. This was the "shield theory." Under the guidance of these two great theoretic achievements, comrade Wei Guangzheng won victory after victory. Practice has proven, "Without Wei Guangzheng, there would be no Sun Kingdom." Following the road of comrade Wei Guangzheng was the choice of the people of the Sun Kingdom and an inevitable trend of historical development.</p>
<p>[<a name="fn3" href="#fr3">3</a>]Indeed, as Chris Jenks notes in his work on the construction of youth, through history, it is the function of civilisation to construct youth as not only an innocent category which needs to be saved but also a demonic identity which needs to be trained and taught into the roles and functions of civilisation. Each emergent technology of cultural production, in its turn, has been examined as potentially contributing to the notions of the youth and their role and function in the society.</p>
<hr />
<h3>References</h3>
<div>
<ol>
<li>Bagga, R.K, Kenneth Keniston and Rohit Raj Mathur (Eds). (2005) The State, IT and Development. New Delhi: Sage.</li>
<li>Bauerlein, Mark. (2008). <em>The Dumbest Generation : How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, or Don't Trust Anyone Under 30</em>. New York : Tarcher/Penguin Books.</li>
<li>BBC News. (2006). "Site Launches: Chinese Wikipedia". Available at <a class="external-link" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4761301.stm">http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4761301.stm</a>.</li>
<li>Bennett, Sue, Karl Maton and Lisa Kervin. 2008. “The ‘Digital Natives’ Report - A Critical Review of the Evidence”, Melbourne. Available at <a class="external-link" href="http://www.cheeps.com/karlmaton/pdf/bjet.pdf">http://www.cheeps.com/karlmaton/pdf/bjet.pdf</a></li>
<li>China Times, The. (2008). “Internet de-addiction centres in China”. Article available at <a class="external-link" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4327258.stm">http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4327258.stm</a></li>
<li>Coleman, Loren. (2007). <em>The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow's Headlines</em>. Simon & Schushter.</li>
<li>Escobar, Arturo. (1994). “Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture.” The Cybercultures Reader. Eds. David Bell and Barbara Kennedy. NY:Routledge.</li>
<li>Himanen, Pekka. (2001). <em>The Hacker Ethic</em>. New York: Random house Trade Paperbacks.</li>
<li>Navejan, Caroline. (2008). <em>The Design of Trust</em>. Utrecht University. (Forthcoming).</li>
<li>Palfrey, John and Urs Gasser. (2008). Born Digital. New York: Basic Books.</li>
<li>Prensky, Marc. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, available at <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/Prensky, Marc. 2001. Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, available at http:/www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf Retrieved January 2009." class="external-link">http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf</a>, retrieved January 2009.</li>
<li>Rheingold, Howard. (2001). Smart Mobs: the next social revolution . New York: Perseus Publishing.</li>
<li>Roy, Sumit. (2005). <em>Globalisation, ICT and Developing Nations</em>. New Delhi: Sage.</li>
<li>Shah, Nishant. (2005). “Playblog: Pornography, Performance and Cyberspace”. Available at <a class="external-link" href="http://www.cut-up.com/news/detail.php?sid=413">http://www.cut-up.com/news/detail.php?sid=413 </a></li>
<li>Shah, Nishant. (2007). “Subject to Technology” Inter Asia Cultural Studies Journal. Available at <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/publications/cis-publications/nishant-shahs-publications" class="external-link">http://cis-india.org/publications/cis-publications/nishant-shahs-publications</a></li>
<li>Tapscott, John. (2008). Grown-Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing your World. New York: Vintage Books.</li>
<li>Tikmany, Rohit. (2003). <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/Tikmany, Rohit. 2003. http:/www.mumbaiorgs.com 3rd March, 2004, 11:15 a.m. IST" class="external-link">http://www.mumbaiorgs.com</a> 3rd March, 2004, 11:15 a.m. IST.</li>
<li>Vaidhyanathan, Siva. (2008). Available at Chronicle of Higher Education, September 19, 2008. <a class="external-link" href="http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i04/04b00701.htm">http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i04/04b00701.htm</a>.</li>
<li>Venugopal, Bijoy. (2003). <a class="external-link" href="http://www.rediff.com/netguide/2003/oct/05flash.htm">http://www.rediff.com/netguide/2003/oct/05flash.htm</a>. 20th December, 2003, 12:23 p.m. IST.</li>
<li>Zuckerman, Ethan. (2008). "The Cute Cat Theory Talk at ETech". Available at <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2008/03/08/the-cute-cat-theory-talk-at-etech/">http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2008/03/08/the-cute-cat-theory-talk-at-etech/</a></li></ol>
<div> </div>
</div>
<p>This research paper was published in Academia.edu. It can be downloaded <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.academia.edu/NishantShah/Papers">here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/digital-natives-and-politics-in-asia'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/digital-natives-and-politics-in-asia</a>
</p>
No publishernishantDigital ActivismWeb PoliticsResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-05-14T12:11:33ZBlog EntryDigital (Alter)Natives with a Cause? — Book Review by Maarten van den Berg
http://editors.cis-india.org/book-review-digital-alternatives
<b>‘Digital (Alter)Natives with a cause?’ is a collection of four books with essays published by the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India, and the Dutch NGO Hivos. The books come in a beautifully designed cassette and are accompanied by a funky yellow package in the shape of a floppy disk containing the booklet ‘D:coding Digital Natives’, a corresponding DVD, and a pack of postcards portraying the evolution of writing - in the sentence ‘I love you’, written with a goose feather in 1734, to the character set ‘i<3u’ entered on a mobile device in 2011.</b>
<h3>Digital Natives</h3>
<p>The publication is the outcome of a programme initiated by the two
organizations to investigate the potentials for social change and
political participation in emerging societies through the use of
internet and communication technologies (ICTs). The programme is
particularly interested in the strategic use of ICTs among young people,
those who are born and have grown up with ‘things digital’ – hence, the
‘digital natives’, a term coined by Marc Prensky in 2001.</p>
<p>But in the preface of the collection and the introduction to the
first book, entitled ‘To Be’, the editors Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen
are quick to stress that by naming digital natives, they do not want to
exclude any position whether defined by age, gender, class, language or
location. Still, ‘we continue with the name’, they say, ‘because we
believe that replacing this name with another is only going to be an
epistemic change which tries to disown the earlier legacies and baggage
that the name carries’. I am not quite sure what that means. I take it
they just like the hashtag #DigitalNatives – and I can’t blame them.</p>
<h3>Testimonies</h3>
<p>So who are these digital natives or how have they become? The booklet
‘D:coding Digital Natives’ portrays some of them. For instance, there
is Frank Odaongkara from Uganda. He says that already in primary school
he had the feeling that computers would change his life. Now Facebook is
his homepage, and he has 1000 ebooks on his laptop, of which he’s read
350 already. Or there is Leandra Flor from the Philippines who says she
became more dynamic and in touch with her surroundings because of the
‘wonders of technology in communication’. She has built her social life
around it.</p>
<p>What emerges from these testimonies, what many of the digital natives
share is the sense of empowerment. They feel empowered by ICTs to
connect to others, to learn something, to engage with the world and
build social lives. Contrary perhaps to the aspirations of the editors, I
do find that the digital natives in emerging societies portrayed in the
publication tend to come from relatively well-to-do families. The
digital divide is still very real, when it comes to access to ICTs and
their life-changing potentials.</p>
<h3>Personal > political</h3>
<p>That digital natives feel empowered by ICTs to build a social life
does of course not necessarily entail that they bring about social
change or pursue political goals. But one thing can lead to the other,
even accidentally. Take the story of Manal Hassan, an Egyptian woman
who found herself trapped in Saudi Arabia when her family went to live
there. She started a blog to write about her problem and got in contact
with other Egyptian bloggers and digital activists. Women rights
organizations adopted her cause, a lawyer took up her case, and she made
news in the mainstream media. She had become a political actor.</p>
<p>There are more such stories in the publication. In the digital age,
it seems, social change has gone viral. Digital natives can become
political actors by sheer coincidence. I believe there is an important
lesson to learn from that for sociologists and political scientists. We
have to come to terms with the serendipity of collective action.</p>
<h3>Digital methodology</h3>
<p>For social scientists, there is more to be learned from the
publication. In the introduction to the essays brought together in the
chapter ‘To Think’ the editors pose that the rise and spread of digital
and online technologies elicit new methods of understanding and
research. And they are quite right. In the essay ‘Digital methods to
study digital natives with a cause’, Esther Weltevrede uses Twitter as a
platform to study digital natives and their practices. And because the
retweet is a practice adopted by digital natives to forward, or give
voice to a message, she proposes that for the researcher the retweet
becomes a way to quantify those messages that have ‘pass-along value’. </p>
<h3>Mob rule 2.0</h3>
<p>As many of the authors are themselves digital natives and activists
of sorts, most of them cannot hide their excitement about the
opportunities that ICTs afford. But there is some room for skepticism
too. Thus, essayist Yi Ping Zou rightly observes that ‘the newly
imagined communities that we call digital natives […] may not be all
progressive, liberal and striving to make a change for the better’. In
her contribution she warns us for ‘mob rule 2.0’ as the very digital
technologies that allow us ‘to create processes of change for a just and
equitable world’ are also technologies that ‘enable massively
regressive and vigilante acts that exercise a mob-based notion of
justice’.</p>
<h3>That vision thing</h3>
<p>And as is the case with any form of collective action, digitally
mediated or not, there is the question of purpose. In an essay that
compares the youth-led ‘revolution’ of 1968 and the Arab Spring of 2011,
David Sasaki observes that both are essentially anti-establishment
movements and that, so far, the latter has prioritized the removal of
the current political class without offering a concrete vision of what
ought to come next. As far as this author is concerned, the digital
natives have yet to develop a vision of their own future – and the
future of their governments.</p>
<p>I believe that we should not expect from today’s youth what
yesterday’s young ones did not accomplish. Let us consider the digital
natives and the technologies they employ for what they do, not for what
they ought to be doing. And after reading some of the testimonies of
digital natives in this publication, I cannot but conclude – as Eddie
Avila does in the last book – that what brings them together is “a
vision that the everyday technologies in their lives can help them make
changes in their immediate environments”. Such is not a vision about
politics writ large. It is about change at the personal level, the
ability to connect and engage with others, and, from there, the
possibility to act collectively – and give it a larger direction.</p>
<p><em>'Digital (Alter)Natives with a cause?', Nishant Shah and Fieke
Jansen (eds), is available for download in four parts at the website of
the Hivos Knowledge Programme.</em></p>
<p>The review by Maarten van den Berg was published in "The Broker" on September 19, 2011. Please click <a class="external-link" href="http://www.thebrokeronline.eu/Articles/Digital-Alter-Natives">here</a> to read the original review.</p>
<h3>About the author</h3>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Maarten.jpg/image_preview" alt="Maarten" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Maarten" /></td>
<td>
<p>A political scientist by training (University of Amsterdam, York
University, Canada), Maarten van den Berg is senior editor of The
Broker,an independent magazine on globalization and development. Before
he joined The Broker in 2011, Maarten worked as a communication and
knowledgement professional for a variety of international organizations,
and still has his own consultancy, RISQ. After work, Maarten loves to
cook and shares in the care of his son Titus. </p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p> Photo credit main picture: Postcard 'Digital Natives' designed by Jonathan Remulla.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/book-review-digital-alternatives'>http://editors.cis-india.org/book-review-digital-alternatives</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaWeb PoliticsResearchers at WorkBook ReviewDigital Natives2015-05-15T11:30:47ZNews ItemBetween the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/stirrup-and-the-ground
<b>In this peer reviewed research paper, Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen draws on a research project that focuses on understanding new technology, mediated identities, and their relationship with processes of change in their immediate and extended environments in emerging information societies in the global south. It suggests that endemic to understanding digital activism is the need to look at the recalibrated relationships between the state and the citizens through the prism of technology and agency. The paper was published in Democracy & Society, a publication of the Center for Democracy and Civil Society, Volume 8, Issue 2, Summer 2011.</b>
<h2>Introduction</h2>
<p>The first decade of the 21st century has witnessed the simultaneous growth of the Internet and digital technologies on the one hand and political protests and mobilization on the other. As a result, some stakeholders attribute magical powers of social change and political transformation to these technologies.</p>
<p>In the post-Wikileaks world, governments try to censor the use of and access to information technologies in order to maintain the status quo (Domscheit-Berg 2011). With the expansion of markets, technology multinationals and service providers are trying to strike a delicate balance between ethics and pro6ts. Civil society organizations for their part, are seeking to counterbalance censorship and exploitation of the citizens’ rights. Within discourse and practice, there remains a dialectic between hope and despair: Hope that these technologies will change the world, and despair that we do not have any sustainable replicable models of technology-driven transformation despite four decades of intervention in the 6eld of information and communication technology (ICT).</p>
<p>This paper suggests that this dialectic is fruitless and results from too strong of a concentration on the functional role of technology. The lack of vocabulary to map and articulate the transitions that digital technologies bring to our earlier understanding of the state-market-citizen relationship, as well as our failure to understand technology as a paradigm that defines the domains of life, labour, and language, amplify this knowledge gap.</p>
<p>This paper draws on a research project that focuses on understanding new technology, mediated identities, and their relationship with processes of change in their immediate and extended environments in emerging information societies in the global south (Shah 2009). We suggest that endemic to understanding digital activism is the need to look at the recalibrated relationships between the state and the citizens through the prism of technology and agency.</p>
<h2>Context</h2>
<p>It is appropriate, perhaps, to begin a paper on digital activism, with a discussion of analogue activism[<a href="#1">1</a>] (Morozov 2010). In the recent revolutions and protests from Tunisia to Egypt and Iran to Kryzygystan, much attention has been given to the role of new media in organizing, orchestrating, performing, and shaping the larger public psyche and the new horizons of progressive governments. Global media has dubbed several of them as ‘Twitter Revolutions” and “Facebook Protests” because these technologies played an important role in the production of :ash-mobs, which, because of their visibility and numbers, became the face of the political protests in di)erent countries. Political scientists as well as technology experts have been trying to figure out what the role of Twitter and Facebook was in these processes of social transformation. Activists are trying to determine whether it is possible to produce replicable upscalable models that can be transplanted to other geo-political contexts to achieve similar results,[<a href="#2">2</a>] as well as how the realm of political action now needs to accommodate these developments.</p>
<p>Cyber-utopians have heralded this particular phenomenon of digital activists mobilizing in almost unprecedented numbers as a hopeful sign that resonates the early 20th century rhetoric of a Socialist Revolution (West and Raman 2009). (ey see this as a symptom of the power that ordinary citizens wield and the ways in which their voices can be ampli6ed, augmented, and consolidated using the pervasive computing environments in which we now live.</p>
<p>In a celebratory tone, without examining either the complex assemblages of media and government practices and policies that are implicated in these processes, they naively attribute these protests to digital technologies.</p>
<p>Cyber-cynics, conversely, insist that these technologies are just means and tools that give voice to the seething anger, hurt, and grief that these communities have harboured for many years under tyrannical governments and authoritarian regimes. They insist that digital technologies played no role in these events — they would have occurred anyway, given the right catalysts — and that this overemphasis on technology detracts from greater historical legacies, movements, and the courage and efforts of the people involved.</p>
<p>While these debates continue to ensue between zealots on conflicting sides, there are some things that remain constant in both positions: presumptions of what it means to be political, a narrow imagination of human-technology relationships, and a historically deterministic view of socio-political movements. While the objects and processes under scrutiny are new and unprecedented, the vocabulary, conceptual tools, knowledge frameworks, and critical perspectives remain unaltered. They attempt to articulate a rapidly changing world in a manner that accommodates these changes. Traditional approaches that produce a simplified triangulation of the state, market and civil society, with historically specified roles, inform these discourses, “where the state is the rule-maker, civil society the do-gooder and watchdog, and the private sector the enemy or hero depending on one’s ideological stand” (Knorringa 2008, 8).</p>
<p>Within the more diffuse world realities, where the roles for each sector are not only blurred but also often shared, things work differently. Especially when we introduce technology, we realize that the centralized structural entities operate in and are better understood through a distributed, multiple avatar model. For example, within public-private partnerships, which are new units of governance in emerging post-capitalist societies, the market often takes up protostatist qualities, while the state works as the beneficiary rather than the arbitrator of public delivery systems. In technology-state conflicts, like the well-known case of Google’s conflict with China (Drummond 2010), technology service providers and companies have actually emerged as the vanguards of citizens’ rights against states that seek to curb them.</p>
<p>Similarly, civil society and citizens are divided around the question of access to technology. The techno-publics are often exclusive and make certain analogue forms of citizenships obsolete. While there is a euphoria about the emergence of a multitude of voices online from otherwise closed societies, it is important to remember that these voices are mediated by the market and the state, and often have to negotiate with strong capillaries of power in order to gain the visibility and legitimacy for themselves. Additionally, the recalibration in the state-market-citizen triad means that there is certain disconnect from history which makes interventions and systemic social change that much more difficult.</p>
<h2>Snapshots</h2>
<p>We draw from our observations in the “Digital Natives with a Cause?”[<a href="#3">3</a>] research program, which brought together over 65 young people working with digital technologies towards social change, and around 40 multi-sector stakeholders in the field to decode practices in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between technology and politics.</p>
<p>The first case study is from Taiwan, where the traditionally accepted uni-linear idea of senders-intermediaries-passive receivers is challenged by adopting a digital information architecture model for a physical campaign.[<a href="#4">4</a>] The story not only provides insight into these blurred boundaries and roles, but also offers an understanding of the new realm of political intervention and processes of social transformation.</p>
<p>As YiPing Tsou (2010) from the Soft Revolt project in Taipei explains, "I have realised how the Web has not only virtually reprogrammed the way we think, talk, act and interact with the work but also reformatted our understanding of everyday life surrounded by all sorts of digital technologies."</p>
<p>Tsou’s own work stemmed from her critical doubt of the dominant institutions and structures in her immediate surroundings. Fighting the hyper-territorial rhetoric of the Internet, she deployed digital technologies to engage with her geo-political contexts. Along with two team members, she started the project to question and critique the rampant consumerism, which has emerged as the state and market in Taiwan collude to build more pervasive marketing infrastructure instead of investing in better public delivery systems. The project adopted a gaming aesthetic where the team produced barcodes, which when applied to existing products in malls and super markets, produced random pieces of poetry at the check-out counters instead of the price details that are expected. The project challenged the universal language of barcodes and mobilized large groups of people to spread these barcodes and create spaces of confusion, transient data doubles, and alternative ways of reading within globalized capitalist consumption spaces. The project also demonstrates how access to new forms of technology also leads to new information roles, creating novel forms of participation leading to interventions towards social transformation.</p>
<p>Nonkululeko Godana (2010) from South Africa does not think of herself as an activist in any traditional form. She calls herself a storyteller and talks of how technologies can amplify and shape the ability to tell stories. Drawing from her own context, she narrates the story of a horrific rape that happened to a young victim in a school campus and how the local and national population mobilized itself to seek justice for her. For Godana, the most spectacular thing that digital technologies of information and communication offer is the ability for these stories to travel in unexpected ways. Indeed, these stories grow as they are told. They morph, distort, transmute, and take new avatars, changing with each telling, but managing to help the message leap across borders, boundaries, and life-styles. She looks at storytelling as something that is innate to human beings who are creatures of information, and suggests that what causes revolution, what brings people together, what allows people to unify in the face of strife and struggle is the need to tell a story, the enchantment of hearing one, and the passion to spread it further so that even when the technologies die, the signal still lives, the message keeps on passing. As Clay Shirky, in his analysis of the first recorded political :ash-mob in Phillipines in 2001, suggests, "social media’s real potential lies in supporting civil society and the public sphere — which will produce change over years and decades, not weeks or months."</p>
<h2>Propositions</h2>
<p>These two stories are just a taste of many such narratives that abound the field of technology based social transformation and activism. In most cases, traditional lenses will not recognize these processes, which are transient and short-lived as having political consequence. When transformative value is ascribed to them, they are brought to bear the immense pressure of sustainability and scalability which might not be in the nature of the intervention. Moreover, as we have seen in these two cases, as well as in numerous others, the younger generation — these new groups of people using social media for political change, often called digital natives, slacktivists, or digital activists — renounce the earlier legacy of political action. They prefer to stay in this emergent undefined zone where they would not want an identity as a political person but would still make interventions and engage with questions of justice, equity, democracy, and access, using the new tools at their disposal to negotiate with their immediate socio-cultural and geo-political contexts.</p>
<p>In their everyday lives, Digital Natives are in different sectors of employment and sections of society. They can be students, activists, government officials, professionals, artists, or regular citizens who spend their time online often in circuits of leisure, entertainment and self-gratification. However, it is their intimate relationship with these processes, which is often deemed as ‘frivolous’ that enables them, in times of crises, to mobilize huge human and infrastructural resources to make immediate interventions.</p>
<p>It is our proposition that it is time to start thinking about digital activism as a tenuous process, which might often hide itself in capillaries of non-cause related actions but can be materialized through the use of digital networks and platforms when it is needed. Similarly, a digital activist does not necessarily have to be a full-time ideology spouting zealot, but can be a person who, because of intimate relationships with technologized forms of communication, interaction, networking, and mobilization, is able to transform him/ herself as an agent of change and attain a central position (which is also transitory and not eternal) in processes of social movement. Such a lens allows us to revisit our existing ideas of what it means to be political, what the new landscapes of political action are, how we account for processes of social change, and who the people are that emerge as agents of change in our rapidly digitizing world.</p>
<h3>About the Authors</h3>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span">NISHANT SHAH is Director-Research at the Bangalore based Centre for Internet and Society. He is one of the lead researchers for the “Digital Natives with a Cause?” knowledge programme and has interests in questions of digital identity, inclusion and social change.</span></p>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span">FIEKE JANSEN is based at the Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation (Hivos). She is the knowledge officer for the Digital Natives with a Cause? knowledge programme and her areas of </span><span class="Apple-style-span">interest are the role of digital technologies in social change processes.</span></p>
<h3><span class="Apple-style-span">References</span></h3>
<p>Domscheit-Berg, Daniel. 2011. <em>Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website</em>. New York: Crown Publishers.</p>
<p>Drummond, David. 2010. “A New Approach to China.” Available at: http:// googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html.</p>
<p>Godana, Nonkululeko. 2011. “Change is Yelling: Are you Listening?” <em>Digital Natives Position Papers</em>. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://www.hivos.net/content/download/ 40567/260946/file/Position%20Papers.pdf. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.</p>
<p>Knorringa, Peter. 2010. A Balancing Act — Private Actors in Development, Inaugural Lecture ISS. Available at: http://www.iss.nl/News/Inaugural-Lecture-Professor-Peter-Knorringa. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.</p>
<p>Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. <em>The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom</em>. New York: Public Affairs.</p>
<p>Shirky, Clay. 2011. “The Political power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change.” <em>Foreign Affairs</em> 90, (1); p. 28-41.</p>
<p>Shah, Nishant and Sunil Abraham. 2009. “Digital Natives with a Cause.” Hivos Knowledge Programme. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://cis-india.org/research/dn-report. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.</p>
<p>Tsou, YiPing. 2010. “(Re)formatting Social Transformation in the Age of Digital Representation: On the Relationship of Technologies and Social Transformation”, <em>Digital Natives Position Papers</em>. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://www.hivos.net/ content/download/40567/260946/file/Position%20Papers.pdf. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.</p>
<p>West, Harry and Parvathi Raman. 2009. <em>Enduring Socialism: Exploration of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation</em>. London: Berghahn Books.</p>
<h3><span class="Apple-style-span">End Notes</span></h3>
<p class="discreet"><a name="1">[1]Morozov looks at how ‘Digital Activism’ often feeds the very structures against we protest, with information that can prove to be counter productive to the efforts. The digital is still not ‘public’ in its ownership and a complex assemblage of service providers, media houses and governments often lead to a betrayal of sensitive information which was earlier protected in the use of analogue technologies of resistance.</a></p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="1"> </a></p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="2">[2]Following the revolutions in Egypt, China, worried that the model </a><a name="1">might be appropriated by its own citizens against China’s authoritarian </a><a name="1">regimes, decided to block “Jan25” and mentions of Egypt from </a><a name="1">Twitter like websites. More can be read here: http://yro.slashdot.org/ </a><span class="Apple-style-span"><a name="1">story/11/01/29/2110227/China-Blocks-Egypt-On-Twitter-Like-Site.</a></span></p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="1"> </a></p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="3">[3]More information about the programme can be found at </a><a name="1">http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/ </a><a name="1">Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause.</a></p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="1"> </a></p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="4">[4]Models of digital communication and networking have always imagined </a><a name="1">that the models would be valid only for the digital environments. Hence, </a><a name="1">the physical world still engages only with the one-to-many broadcast model, </a><a name="1">where the central authorities produce knowledge which is disseminated to the passive receivers who operate only as receptacles of information rather than bearers of knowledge. To challenge this requires a re-orientation of existing models and developing ways of translating the peer-to-peer structure in the physical world.</a></p>
<p><strong><span class="Apple-style-span">Cross-posted from Democracy & Society, read the original <a class="external-link" href="http://www.democracyandsociety.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/CDACS-DS-15-v3-fnl.pdf">here</a></span></strong></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/stirrup-and-the-ground'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/stirrup-and-the-ground</a>
</p>
No publishernishantDigital ActivismWeb PoliticsResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-05-14T12:14:04ZBlog EntryWhat scares a Digital Native? Blogathon
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/what-scares-a-digital-native-blogathon-1
<b>What Scares technologized young people around the world? In an effort to present a view often not heard in traditional discourses, on Monday the 18th of April 2011, young people from across the world blogged about their fears in relation to the digitalisation of society.
</b>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/what-scares-a-digital-native-blogathon-1'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/what-scares-a-digital-native-blogathon-1</a>
</p>
No publishertettnerWeb PoliticsResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-05-14T12:16:14ZBlog EntryWho the Hack?
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/who-the-hack
<b>A hacker is not an evil spirit, instead he can outwit digital systems to bring about social change, writes Nishant Shah in this column published in the Indian Express on April 24, 2011.</b>
<p>One of the most sullied words that have pervaded public discourse, with the rise of the internet, is “hacker”. The word conjures up images of a silent, menacing, technology-savvy young man, who, with his almost magical control over the digital realm, manipulates systems, changes the laws, rewrites the rules and takes complete control. We hear stories about criminals hacking often enough — people who break into national security systems and retrieve sensitive information, teenagers who crash servers by spamming them with unnecessary traffic, users who commit credit fraud by phishing or breaking into bank accounts, or shutting down entire systems by erasing all the code.</p>
<h3>Hackers v/s Crackers</h3>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/hacking.jpg/image_preview" alt="Hacking" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Hacking" /></p>
<p>As many of us know, the term hacker has a different origin and meaning than its abused application. In fact, people who perform maleficent activities using their technological prowess are called “crackers” — these are people who use their ability to interact with a system in order to make personal gains or to harass others. A hacker is a person who has extraordinary technology skills and is able to manipulate digital systems and makes them perform tasks which were not a part of their original design. Which means that a geek who can hack into a server and uses the free space to host a free website, aimed for public good, or a techie who writes a programme that can use the idle computing time of your machines to run peer-to-peer networks, or a teenager who can break the constraints of an existing software to integrate it with other programmes, are all hackers. A hacker is defined by his ability to play around with the basic elements of a system (not necessarily digital and internet-based) and perform actions, sometimes for social good, but often, for fun and to explore the digital world’s frontiers. They are not the evil spirits that we often imagine them to be.</p>
<p>Hackers can be suffused with a spirit of civic good and of social beneficence. Around the world, hackers have used their technology skills to make public interventions to resolve a crisis in their environments. From the now notorious Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks platform to more positive efforts like Ipaidabribe.com, a civic hackers have emerged as our new heroes. Ipaidabribe.com is a civic hacking website, which allows users to use digital storytelling as a method by which they can start discussions on corruption and what we can do to change the systems.</p>
<p>Many digital natives are civic hackers. Aditya Kulkarni, one of our earliest participants with the “Digital Natives with a Cause” programme, is a digital native civic hacker. Like many young people in India, Aditya, from Mumbai, found the field of electoral politics opaque. He found it difficult to understand why good people voted for bad leaders and why large sections of the society shirk their responsibility to vote, thus leading to flawed governments. He, with his friends, started VoteIndia.in, a website where they collected information from public domain sources about electoral candidates in their local constituencies, so that voters could make informed decisions. The website was an instance of civic hacktivism.</p>
<p>I talk about hacking because I want to draw your attention to the phenomenon that started with Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption stance and the series of public interventions that surrounded it. Hazare has emerged as a hero for many. He has been trending on Twitter, there are pages dedicated to him on Facebook, Tumblr blogs have been spreading his word, text messages have urged people to come out in support. While there is much speculation about Hazare’s politics and the media spectacle that it has created, little attention has been given to Hazare’s almost exclusively off-line campaign and the way in which social media tools have been able to capture his momentum and turn it into a series of civic hacktivist interventions.</p>
<p>Flashmobs with people bearing candles and chanting against corruption emerged in cities. Public consultations organised by young people saw critical engagement with questions of corruption. The interwebz have been abuzz with people expressing opinions and calling for public mobilisation. Anti-corruption convictions have found resonance with people who, otherwise, despite having access to these technologies, would not necessarily have engaged in these kinds of civic hacktivities. This, for me, is not only a sign of hope but also a moment of understanding that digital activism is not always restricted to the digital domain.</p>
<p>As in the case of Aditya, and that of Hazare, the germ of an idea is often offline. The processes of protest and demonstration towards social change travel across the physical and the digital world. The idea of a digital native as a civic hacktivist reminds us that the young person behind the computer, in a virtual reality, is not dissociated from the embedded contexts of everyday life. Their skills with the computer often help them make critical interventions to mobilise social change.</p>
<p><em>See the original article published by the Indian Express <a class="external-link" href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/who-the-hack/779496/">here</a></em></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/who-the-hack'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/who-the-hack</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaWeb PoliticsResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-05-14T12:16:59ZBlog EntryI Believe that .......... should be a Right in the Digital Age
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/i-believe-that-______-should-be-a-right-in-the-digital-age
<b>On Monday March 21, 2011, people from three continents blogged about what they believe will/should/are rights in the digital age, as part of the "Digital Natives with a Cause?" project. From "free music" to "many identities", people have a varied and rich set of beliefs of what should constitute a right. </b>
<p></p>
<p>What do you think should be a right in the digital age?</p>
<p>This is the question which community members, facilitators and
organizers of the “Digital Natives with a Cause?” project asked themselves on
Monday, 21 March 2011.</p>
<p>Juan-Manuel Casanueva, a facilitator at the
workshop in Chile, talks about the <a class="external-link" href="http://digitalnatives.in/jmcasanueva/blogs/right-be-read-and-heard-anyone">right to be heard and read by anyone</a>. Juan
Manuel sets up a historical picture, explaining that the quest for global
dialogue advanced tremendously with the implementation of the Internet.
Early proponents of the Internet spoke of a world where people, enabled by the
technology, would communicate with each other seamlessly. Casanueva explains that this
is not the case; roughly 30 years after the Internet began people are still
using the Internet as an extension of their community-based communication
model. Now that the hardware is there, it is time to start questioning the
other and possibly more subtle aspects of global communication like the
linguistics and social attitudes…</p>
<p> But of
course, how could we all communicate if not all of us have access yet? This is an issue that Nilofar, a participant of
the workshop in Taipei, and <a class="external-link" href="http://digitalnatives.in/fernandatusa/blogs/i-believe-come-you-inside-you-0">Fernanda</a> another participant from Ecuador explores more in depth in their
post. <a class="external-link" href="http://digitalnatives.in/nilofar/blogs/rights-digital-age-freedom-access">The right to access information freely and universally</a> is one which Nilofar advocates be expanded beyond those with disability to include “your friend,
neighbour or the needy nerd?” This way, access will not only be provided to
those below the poverty line, but for those who already enjoy access, it won’t
continue to be politicized, corrupted, commoditized and in general
under-utilized.</p>
<p>Paidamoyo also talks about access,
specifically <a class="external-link" href="http://digitalnatives.in/paida/blogs/women-access-new-ict-should-be-right">access by women</a>. He describes the emergence of digital
technologies as being crucial to the enlargement of the gap between men and
women, simply because men enjoyed more access. Today, women have been left
outside of the technology revolution, which is a huge problem since 52 per cent of the
world’s population consists of women.</p>
<p>To properly access all of the wonders that the world of Internet offers we need to know how to physically operate a computer,
but there are a series of more intangible skills needed. Simeon, a participant
from the workshop in Johannesburg proposes that <a class="external-link" href="http://digitalnatives.in/mtotowajirani/blogs/theres-more-digital-literacy-just-mere-skills-right-digital-literacy">being digitally literate</a> should
be a right in the information age. What does he mean by being literate? Well, Simeon
explains that “digital” is more of a mindset than a condition: it is an
approach to life and not a method. “A
number of people may have access to digital tools and technology but very few
will get the opportunity to learn the techniques needed to maximize their
investment on digital tools” he says, and it is as useful or sometimes more to
teach people about the value and the potential uses of digital technologies
than the mere skill.</p>
<p>Now, what do we
do with all the information once we have accessed it? Jenny from Costa Rica
believes <a class="external-link" href="http://digitalnatives.in/jencg/blogs/sharing-caring-right-share">we should share it</a>. Spreading the digital love should be a right
according to her, because sharing is analogous to growing: a process which
makes us better. “we are entitled to share. We like to share our opinions, our
work, to share questions and even complaints. It is a natural response,
an impulse, you may think” She mentions platforms like bandcamp where
musicians can upload their music and share it for free, and Creative Commons
licenses which allow for legal ways of collaborating while maintaining
authorship rights. But what happens when the information online is restricted
and modifying it or sharing it is illegal? Adolfo from Nicaragua believes we
all have <a class="external-link" href="http://digitalnatives.in/fitoria/blogs/i-believe-we-have-right-hack">the right to hack!</a> Adolfo explains that nowadays “hacking” has
negative overtones, but that the origins of the word simply refer to someone
who modified trains for better performance or appeal. Adolfo believes that if
he pays for something, he has the right to modify it, change it, tweak it, add
to it, remove from it, and deface it in any way he wants. Adolfo and Shehla
from India would get along very well, because Shehla believes <a class="external-link" href="http://digitalnatives.in/shehla/blogs/i-believe-free-music-should-be-right-digital-age">free music</a> should
be a right in the digital age. What is stealing? Are we reaching a point where
illegally downloading music is not morally incorrect? “(most
people) would never think of stealing a CD from a store (or at least not that
easily). So what exactly is stealing? And more so, in the online world? It’s as
easy as the click of a button… can’t be that bad”.</p>
<p>Still, not everyone advocated for increasing
access, Fieke from Hivos in the Netherlands believes that <a class="external-link" href="http://digitalnatives.in/fieke/blogs/right-unplug">being able to unplug</a>
is a right. Fieke tells of how she lives a technologically savvy life, having a
presence on Facebook, Twitter and other social media, answering emails for the better
part of the day, but she does enjoy being able to turn off her cellphone and
enjoy the sun on a clear day. Are we losing our ability to do that? When you
send an sms message, do you expect the person to answer immediately? What kind
of pressure does this put us under? It might not be as easy as we think to
disconnect ourselves: The discourse of accessibility as a right plays an
important role in development, so institutionalizing the right to disconnect might
prove counter-productive if it is abused as an excuse to purposely alienate or
marginalize certain groups. We also have
to think that there are financial interests at play, as the more connected one
is the more can be sold to one and the more that can be commoditized. Angela
from the Philippines has a similar concern:
<a class="external-link" href="http://digitalnatives.in/angela-minas/blogs/maybe-we-have-lost-right-not-know">Are we losing the right to not know?</a>
With the increasing arrival of web 3, the amount of information we
constantly access, manipulate, assimilate and re-transmit is vast. In an age of
ubiquitous information bombardment, can we choose to be ignorant? Are there any
situations where actually not knowing is a valid alternative?</p>
<p>Some people focused on how we access (or
choose to not access) information and what we do with it, some others focused
on how said access affects our personalities, our identities and who we
perceive we are. Nishant from CIS in India thinks that <a class="external-link" href="http://digitalnatives.in/nishant/blogs/right-be-many">having multiple
identities</a> should be a right in the digital age. Nishant explains that even
though we all have different aspects of our personalities which constitute different
identities, because of the nature of social interactions and the spaces where
these occurred, we were forced to choose one identity at a time. “The analogue
individual was subjected to the laws of linear physics and time, where s/he was
allowed to be only one person at one time and mapped to the one body”. Now,
with the arrival of the digital individual, we can be many in many ways, in
many spaces, simultaneously.</p>
<p>Because we can express our different
identities freely and without needing to be consolidated into “one”, this frees
up the possibility of having multiple and often contradictory opinions. The
Internet has the potential of being a place where one can explore the varying
meanings and impacts of each of his/her identities. Yet, experiences online get
“fixed” into one of these identities,
for example, if I am the person who usually posts news on my Facebook page, the
community around me tends to expect this kind of behaviour from me, to the point
where if I want to change my mind I need to withdraw completely from the
community. This is why Josine from HIVOS in the Netherlands thinks that there
should be more online spaces where one is allowed to <a class="external-link" href="http://digitalnatives.in/josine/blogs/right-change-your-mind">change one’s mind</a>. A
related idea to that one of being able to change one’s mind according to the
particular identity is the ability to <a class="external-link" href="http://digitalnatives.in/tettner/blogs/i-believe-being-able-choose-ones-identity-right">choose one’s identity</a>. Samuel Tettner expresses that the analogue person’s personality was directly
tied to his/her environment and surroundings. This way, the identity was
determined by the place where one was born, the surrounding community and its
language, customs and traditions. In the digital age, people have access to a
much more culture, and the global quality of the Internet is helping to break the continuity between physical space and identity.</p>
<p>So, what do you think of cross-section of what
people think should be rights in the digital age? Write down your comments
please. Of course, if you don’t, you’d still be within your rights as a digital
being, at least according to Prabhas who lives in Kosovo. Prabhas believes that
the <a class="external-link" href="http://digitalnatives.in/prabhas/blogs/right-lurk#new">right to lurk</a> should be a right in the digital age. “In an age of
increasing digital participation, silent participation must be considered
participation, and left be. Not everyone needs to comment, vote, whatever else.
Some may just read/watch/listen, and perhaps, appreciate. It is okay if no
thumb is clicked up, no quick reply sent back. No blog written."</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/i-believe-that-______-should-be-a-right-in-the-digital-age'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/i-believe-that-______-should-be-a-right-in-the-digital-age</a>
</p>
No publishertettnerDigital ActivismWeb PoliticsResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-05-14T12:20:12ZBlog EntryThe 'Beyond the Digital' Directory
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/the-beyond-the-digital-directory
<b>For the past few months, Maesy Angelina has been sharing the insights gained from her research with Blank Noise on the activism of digital natives. The ‘Beyond the Digital’ directory offers a list of the posts on the research based on the order of its publication.</b>
<p></p>
<p>Have you ever
wondered what is really “new” about the activism of digital natives? In May
2010, the Hivos-CIS ‘Digital Natives with a Cause?’ Knowledge Programme started
a collaboration The Blank Noise Project in India and Maesy Angelina, a
student-researcher from the Erasmus University of Rotterdam – International
Institute of Social Studies in The Hague who is taking up the research agenda
for her final project to qualify for her Masters degree in International
Development with a specialization in Children and Youth Studies.</p>
<p>Maesy
has been blogging about the insights she gained from her field work in
Bangalore in the CIS website under the ‘Beyond the Digital’ series, which
consists of the following posts:</p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst"> </p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst"><strong>1. <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/beyond-the-digital-understanding-digital-natives-with-a-cause/weblogentry_view" class="external-link">Beyond the Digital: Understanding
Digital Natives with a Cause</a></strong></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">Digital
natives with a cause: the future of activism or slacktivism? Maesy Angelina
argues that the debate is premature given the obscured understanding on youth
digital activism and contends that an effort to understand this from the
contextualized perspectives of the digital natives themselves is a crucial
first step to make. This is the first out of a series of posts on her journey
to explore new insights to understand youth digital activism through a research
with Blank Noise under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge
Programme.</p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"> </p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"><strong>2. <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/first-thing-first/weblogentry_view" class="external-link">First Thing First</a></strong></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">Studies
often focus on how digital natives do their activism in identifying the
characteristics of youth digital activism and dedicate little attention to what
the activism is about. The second blog post in the Beyond the Digital series
reverses this trend and explores how Blank Noise articulates the
issue it addresses: street sexual harassment.</p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"> </p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/talking-back-without-talking-back" class="external-link"><strong>3. Talking Back without “Talking Back”</strong></a></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"><span class="description">The activism of digital natives is often
considered different from previous generations because of the methods and tools
they use. However, reflecting on my conversations with Blank Noise
and my experience in the ‘Digital Natives Talking Back’ workshop in Taipei, the
difference goes beyond the method and can be spotted at the analytical level –
how young people today are <em>thinking</em>
about their activism. <br /></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"> </p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/taking-it-to-the-streets/" class="external-link">4. Taking It to the Streets</a></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast">The previous posts in the Beyond the Digital series have discussed the distinct ways in which young people today are thinking about their activism. The fourth post elaborates further on how this is translated into practice by sharing the experience of a Blank Noise street intervention: Y ARE U LOOKING AT ME?</p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"> </p>
<a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/the-digital-tipping-point" class="external-link">5. The Digital Tipping Point</a>
<p> </p>
<span id="parent-fieldname-description" class="kssattr-atfieldname-description kssattr-templateId-widgets/textarea kssattr-macro-textarea-field-view inlineEditable">Is
Web 2.0 really the only reason why youth digital activism is so
successful in mobilizing public engagement? A look into the
transformation of Blank Noise’s blog from a one-way communication medium
into a site of public dialogue and collaboration reveals the crucial
factors behind the success.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/diving-into-the-digita" class="external-link">6. Diving Into the Digital</a><br /></span>
<p> </p>
<p>Previous posts in the ‘Beyond the Digital’ series have discussed the non-virtual aspects and presence of Blank Noise. However, to understand the activism of digital natives also require a look into their online presence and activities. This post explores how Blank Noise’s engagement with the public in their digital realm.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/the-class-question" class="external-link">7. The Class Question</a></p>
<p><span id="parent-fieldname-description" class="kssattr-atfieldname-description kssattr-templateId-widgets/textarea kssattr-macro-textarea-field-view inlineEditable">Blank
Noise aims to be as inclusive as possible and therefore does not
identify any specific target groups. Yet, the spaces and the methods
they occupy do attract certain kinds of volunteers and public. This
raises the class question: what are the dilemmas around class on digital
interventions? Are they any different from the dilemmas on street
interventions? <br /></span></p>
<p><span id="parent-fieldname-description" class="kssattr-atfieldname-description kssattr-templateId-widgets/textarea kssattr-macro-textarea-field-view inlineEditable"><br /></span></p>
<p><span id="parent-fieldname-description" class="kssattr-atfieldname-description kssattr-templateId-widgets/textarea kssattr-macro-textarea-field-view inlineEditable"><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/the-many-faces-within" class="external-link">8. The Many Faces Within</a></span></p>
<p><span id="parent-fieldname-description" class="kssattr-atfieldname-description kssattr-templateId-widgets/textarea kssattr-macro-textarea-field-view inlineEditable">Blank
Noise, as many other digital native collectives, may seem to be
complete horizontal at first glance. But, a closer look reveals the many
different possibilities for involvement and a unique way the collective
organize itself. <br /></span></p>
<p><span id="parent-fieldname-description" class="kssattr-atfieldname-description kssattr-templateId-widgets/textarea kssattr-macro-textarea-field-view inlineEditable"><br /></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/activism-unraveling-the-term" class="external-link">9. Activism: Unraveling the Term</a></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"><span id="parent-fieldname-description" class="kssattr-atfieldname-description kssattr-templateId-widgets/textarea kssattr-macro-textarea-field-view inlineEditable">After
discussing Blank Noise’s politics and ways of organizing, the current
post explores whether activism is still a relevant concept to capture
the involvement of people within the collective. I explore the questions
from the vantage point of the youth actors, through conversations about
how they relate with the very term of activism. <br /></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"> </p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/reflecting-from-the-beyond" class="external-link">10. Reflecting from the Beyond</a></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"><span id="parent-fieldname-description" class="kssattr-atfieldname-description kssattr-templateId-widgets/textarea kssattr-macro-textarea-field-view inlineEditable">After
going ‘beyond the digital’ with Blank Noise through the last nine
posts, the final post in the series reflects on the understanding gained
so far about youth digital activism and questions one needs to carry in
moving forward on researching, working with, and understanding digital
natives. <br /></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"><br /><span id="parent-fieldname-description" class="kssattr-atfieldname-description kssattr-templateId-widgets/textarea kssattr-macro-textarea-field-view inlineEditable"></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"><span id="parent-fieldname-description" class="kssattr-atfieldname-description kssattr-templateId-widgets/textarea kssattr-macro-textarea-field-view inlineEditable"></span>While the posts present bits and pieces of field research notes and reflections from data analysis, the full research products are:</p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast">- Angelina, M. (2010) '<a class="external-link" href="http://thesis.eur.nl/theses/law_culture_society/iss/cys/index/863849405/">Beyond the Digital: Understanding Contemporary Forms of Youth Activism - The Case of Blank Noise in Urban India</a>'. Unpublished thesis, graded with Distinction. The Hague: International Institute of Social Studies - Erasmus University of Rotterdam.</p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast">- Angelina, M. (2010) '<a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/position-paper/view?searchterm=position%20paper%20digital%20natives" class="external-link">Towards a New Relationship of Exchange</a>'. Position paper for the Digital Natives with a Cause Thinkathon. </p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/the-beyond-the-digital-directory'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/the-beyond-the-digital-directory</a>
</p>
No publishermaesyYouthDigital ActivismDigital NativesWeb PoliticsStreet sexual harassmentBlank Noise ProjectBeyond the DigitalCommunitiesart and interventionResearchers at Work2015-05-15T11:33:39ZBlog EntryDigital Natives with a Cause?
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnrep
<b>Digital Natives With A Cause? - a product of the Hivos-CIS collaboration charts the scholarship and practice of youth and technology with a specific attention for developing countries to create a framework that consolidates existing paradigms and informs further research and intervention within diverse contexts and cultures.</b>
<p></p>
<p><img class="image-left" src="../dnr/image_preview" alt="Digital Natives Report" /><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/" class="external-link">The Centre for Internet and Society</a>, Bangalore and <a class="external-link" href="http://http://www.hivos.net/">Hivos</a> have assessed
the state of knowledge on the potential impact of youth for social
transformation and political engagement in the South. This report ‘<em>Digital Natives with a Cause?’</em>
charts the scholarship and practice of youth and technology and informs
further research and intervention within diverse contexts and cultures.</p>
<p>
The report displays that digital natives have a potential impact as
agents of change. It concludes that multidisciplinary theoretical
approaches venturing beyond the cause-and-effect model and providing
the necessary vocabulary and sensitivity are crucial to understanding
Digital Natives. The lament that youths are apolitical is a result of
insufficient attention to activities that do not conform to existing
notions of political and civil society formation. Digital Natives are
sensitive and thoughtful. It is time to listen to them and their ideas,
and to focus on their development as responsible and active citizens
rather than on their digital exploits or technologised interests.</p>
<p>The report specifically focuses on youth as e-agents of change within emerging information societies to explore questions of technology mediated identities, embedded conditions of social transformation and political participation, as well as potentials for sustained livelihood and education. It identifies the knowledge gaps and networks and further areas of intervention in the field of Digital Natives.</p>
<p>As a first step in working towards enabling Digital Natives for
social transformation and political engagement, Hivos and CIS will
organize a Multistakeholder Conference Fall 2010.</p>
<p>A summary of the report, as well as the detailed narrative are now available for discussion, debate, suggestions and ideas.</p>
<p class="Inleiding"> </p>
<p class="Inleiding">Digital Natives with a Cause? - Report Download Pdf document <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/uploads/dnrep1" class="internal-link" title="Digital Natives with a Cause? - Report">Here</a></p>
<p class="Inleiding">Digital Natives with a Cause? - Report Summary Download Pdf document<a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/uploads/dnsum" class="internal-link" title="Digital Natives with a Cause? - Summary of Report"> Here</a></p>
<p class="Inleiding"> </p>
<p class="Inleiding">The report is also available at <a class="external-link" href="http://http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause/News/New-Publication-on-Digital-Natives">http://http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause/News/New-Publication-on-Digital-Natives</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnrep'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnrep</a>
</p>
No publishernishantRAW PublicationsDigital NativesWeb PoliticsFeaturedBooksDigital subjectivitiesResearchers at Work2015-05-15T11:31:14ZBlog EntryDigital Natives with a Cause? Thinkathon: Position Paper
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/publications/position-paper
<b>The Digital Natives with a Cause? research inquiry seeks to look at the potentials of social change and political participation through technology practices of people in emerging ICT contexts. In particular it aims to address knowledge gaps that exist in the scholarship, practice and popular discourse around an increasing usage, adoption and integration of digital and Internet technologies in social transformation processes. A conference called Digital Natives with a Cause? Thinkathon was jointly organised by CIS and Hivos in the Hague in December 2010. The Thinkathon aimed to reflect on these innovations in social transformation processes and its effects on development, and in particular to understand how new processes of social transformation can be supported and sustained, how they can inform our existing practices, and provide avenues of collaboration between Digital Natives and "Analogue Activists". </b>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/publications/position-paper'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/publications/position-paper</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaRAW PublicationsWeb PoliticsDigital NativesPublicationsResearchers at Work2015-05-08T12:22:29ZFile