The Centre for Internet and Society
http://editors.cis-india.org
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The Digital Classroom: Social Justice and Pedagogy
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/facultyworkshop
<b>What happens when we look at the classroom as a space of social justice? What are the ways in which students can be engaged in learning beyond rote memorisation? What innovative methods can be evolved to make students stakeholders in their learning process? These were some of the questions that were thrown up and discussed at the 2 day Faculty Training workshop for participant from colleges included in the Pathways to Higher Education programme, supported by Ford Foundation and collaboratively executed by the Higher Education Innovation and Research Application and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.</b>
<p></p>
<p>The workshop focused on 3 chief challenges in contemporary
pedagogy and teaching in higher education in India as identified by <a class="external-link" href="http://heira.in/">HEIRA</a>: The need for innovative
curricula, challenges to social justice in education, and possibilities offered
by the intersection of digital and internet technologies with classroom
teaching and evaluation. In the open discussions, the participating faculty
members used their multidisciplinary skills and teaching experience to look at possibilities that we might implement in our classrooms to create a more
inclusive and participatory environment. The conversations were varied, and
through 3 blog entries I want to capture the focus points of the workshop. In
this first post, I focus specifically on the changing nature of student
engagement with education and innovative ways by which we can learn from the
digital platforms of learning and knowledge production and implement certain
innovations in pedagogy that might better help create inclusive and just learning
environments in the undergraduate classroom in India.</p>
<p><strong>Peer 2 Peer:</strong> One of the observations that was made
unanimously by all the faculty members was that students respond better, learn
faster, engage more deeply with their syllabus when the instructor has a
personal rapport with them. Traditionally, the teachers who have established
human contact which goes beyond the call of duty are also the teachers that
have become catalysts and inspirations for the students. Especially with the
digital aesthetics of non-hierarchical information interaction, this has become
the call of the day.</p>
<p>Establishing the teacher as a peer within the classroom,
rather than the fountainhead of information flow, is an experiment worth
conducting. Like on other digital platforms, can we think of the classroom as a
space where the interlocutors each bring their life experience and learning to
start an information exchange and dialogue that would make them stakeholders in
the process of learning? This would mean that the teacher would be a <em>facilitator</em> who builds conditions of
knowledge production and dissemination, thus also changing his/her relationship
with the idea of curriculum and teaching.</p>
<p><strong>Reciprocal evaluation</strong>: It was pointed out that the grade
oriented academic system often leads to students disengaging with innovative
and meaningful learning practices. With the pressure of completing the
curriculum, the students’ instrumental relationship with their classroom
learning and the highly conservative structures of higher education that do not
offer enough space to experiment with the teaching methods, it often becomes
difficult to initiate innovative pedagogic practices. Learning from the
differently hierarchised digital spaces, it was suggested that one of the ways
by which this could be countered is by introducing reciprocal evaluation
patterns which might not directly be associated with the grades but would
recognise and appreciate the skills that students bring to their learning.</p>
<p>Inspired by the Badges contest at <a class="external-link" href="http://hastac.org/tag/badges">HASTAC</a>,
it was suggested that evaluation has to take into account, more than grades.
Different students bring different skills, experiences, personalities and
behaviours to bear upon the syllabus. They work individually and in clusters to
understand and analyse the curriculum. Recognising these skills and the roles
that they play in their learning environments is essential. Getting students to
offer different badges to each other as well as to the teachers involved, helps
them understand their own learning process and engages them in new ways of
learning.</p>
<p><strong>Role based learning: </strong>Within the Web 2.0 there is a peculiar
condition where individuals are recognised simultaneously as experts and
novices. They bring certain knowledges and experiences to the table which make
them credible sources of information and analysis in those areas. At the same
time, they are often beginner learners in certain other areas and they harness
the power of the web to learn. Such a distributed imagination of a student as
not equally proficient in all areas, but diversely equipped to deal with
different disciplines is missing from our understanding of the higher education
classroom.</p>
<p>We discussed the possibility of making the student responsible not
only for his/her own learning but also the learning of the peers in the
classroom. Making the student aware of what s/he is good at and where s/he is
lacking allows them to gain confidence and also realise that everybody has
differential strengths and aptitudes. Such a classroom might look different
because the students don’t have to be pitched in stressful competition with
each other but instead work collaboratively to learn, research and produce
knowledge in a nurturing and supportive learning environment.</p>
<p>These initial discussions look at the possibility of
innovative classroom teaching that can accommodate for the skills and
differences of the students in higher education in India. The conversations
opened up the idea that the classroom can be reshaped so that it becomes a more
inclusive space where the quality of students’ access to education can be
improved. It also ties in with the larger imagination of classrooms as spaces
where principles of social justice can be invoked so that students who are
disadvantaged in language, learning skills, socio-economic backgrounds, are not
just looked at as either ‘beyond help’ or ‘victims of a system’. Instead, it
encourages to look at the students as differential learners who need to be made
stakeholders in their own processes of learning and education.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/facultyworkshop'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/facultyworkshop</a>
</p>
No publishernishantHigher EducationAccess to KnowledgeDigital NativesFeaturedNew PedagogiesResearchers at WorkDigital Pluralism2015-05-08T12:36:29ZBlog EntryUnpacking Digital Natives from their Shiny Packaging
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/unpacking-from-shiny-packaging
<b>The ‘Digital natives’ concept is neither necessarily nor inherently positive, as YiPing Tsou highlights in her article Digital Natives in the Name of a Cause: From "Flash Mob" to "Human Flesh Search". The essay was published in the Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Book 2, To Think. Argyri Panezi reviews the essay.</b>
<p>In this article, the writer supports that China, despite having a
plethora of hacker talents, does not conform to the typical paradigm of
liberal, usually anti-government, group of digital natives. She explains
that the so-called “red hackers” are working hand-in-hand with the
dominant ideology, fighting against the enemy abroad while hunting down
the enemy within who disrupts the ‘harmony’ (of the nation). Focusing on
China’s digital culture, Tsou demonstrates that digital natives,
despite what is commonly thought of them as a universal group, can also
engage in far from civic-minded activities. The stories of Human Flesh
Search as described in the article, gives flesh to this argument. <br /><br />‘Human
Flesh Search’ is a Chinese phenomenon of online crowdsourcing that
targets ‘morality violators’ (the modern versions of medieval witches).
Most importantly, the punishment meted out to these ‘violators’ is not
only harsh (the mob versus an individual) but also reaches beyond
cyberspace, affecting the real lives of the one who’s hunted, even
affecting the lives of their family. All the examples given, illustrate
how this ‘naming-and-shaming’ trend becomes an insidious calling card of
the entire hacking society in China. <br /><br />As Tsou explains, Human
Flesh Searches mobilize masses of people online or offline to identify
certain violators of ‘morality’ that the community seeks to punish
because the ‘crimes’ might not be punishable by the law. Indeed, the
Human Flesh Search stories bring in mind B-grade reality shows: as the
first story goes, the real identity of a woman staring in a
kitten-killing video is discovered and consequently, the woman is
attacked both in cyberspace (via email, social media networks) and in
real space (her residence, work place). Another story seems more
serious, mainly from a political and legal perspective; a student
expressing himself in favor of a Korean ruling in a sports game is
immediately dealt by the online community as a traitor who has to pay
for what he has said online. What seems to follow, within these stories,
are blatant violations of privacy and freedom of speech. <br /> <br />What
message do the Human Flesh Searches stories convey? What are these
stories teaching us? While Internet enthusiasts have connected digital
natives with progressive liberal movements, it is also the case that
some can be (ab)using the powers of technology, and principally the
power of crowd-sourcing, engaging in phenomena that even recap medieval
witch-hunt. It is clear that the rationale of the author is not to call
for more regulation or censorship online, but rather to point out that
technology and the Internet is merely a tool, and as every tool it can
have both good and bad uses; a knife might be used safely in a kitchen,
it can save lives in the hands of a doctor, and can take lives in the
hand of a murderer.<br /><br />Tsou cleverly alternates between the phrases
‘wisdom of the crowd’, ‘crowd-sourcing’ and ‘irrationality of the
crowds’. While the majority can collaborate to get brilliant results, it
can also quickly become a tyranny against anything ‘different’,
‘irregular’ or ‘immoral’. Wikipedia is a famous example of the first (a
success story of mass collaboration) but also the second (see the
editing wars on Wikipedia talk pages). <br /><br />In all, Tsou
effectively reminds us that the aspiring digital stories of peer-to-peer
culture and civic empowerment, including technology-mobilized
revolutions such as the recent examples in the Middle East and
elsewhere, do have a counter side, what the author calls “the dark force
of digital natives”. The importance of this realization is immense.
Internet romanticism can be at the very least naïve, and at most
dangerous as it gives space to the abusers to continue their work using a
tool that is wrongly considered solely equalizing, empowering,
liberating. <br /><br /><em>Argyri Panezi, a native of Greece, studied
law at the University of Athens and at Harvard Law School (focusing on
issues of Internet law and policy), now practicing as an attorney at law
in Brussels, Belgium. </em></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/unpacking-from-shiny-packaging'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/unpacking-from-shiny-packaging</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaDigital Natives2011-12-25T05:04:43ZNews ItemOn Natives, Norms and Knowledge
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/on-natives-and-norms
<b>Philip Ketzel reviews Ben Wagner's essay "Natives, Norms and Knowledge: How Information Technologies Recalibrate Social & Political Power Relations Communications" published in Book 4: To Connect.</b>
<p>Using digital technologies has become so convenient that with the
rise of the so called digital revolution arose also the need to reflect
it. A very impressive compilation of reflections dealing with the role
and impact of the “user” (or digital native, as it is now called) comes
in the form of a four book collective called <a class="external-link" href="http://www.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook/">Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? </a>by
the Centre for Internet & Society and Hivos. The fourth book
features Ben Wagner’s essay Natives, Norms and Knowledge: How
Information and Communications Technologies Recalibrate Social and
Political Power Relations. It is a text I strongly recommend, especially
to those interested in the reasons behind contemporary policies that
try to regulate digital activism such as the US SOPA Act.</p>
<p>Wagner starts out by recapitulating the fact that, as any
technological progress, the digital revolution has produced profound
cultural changes. In order to make these changes more visible and to
question their implications, he analyses the ways in which they can be
understood as shifts of "sociological, normative and knowledge
boundaries" (p. 22).Yet behind every boundary lies a legitimising
process setting it up. Hence, Wagner is also interested in the
discourses and institutions that legitimise these shifts of boundaries.</p>
<p><strong>So where and how are the boundaries being shifted?</strong></p>
<p>For example, there is the fact that now more people have the power to
influence what we call reality or history. Wagner points out that this
new power is socially seen less evenly distributed than one would hope.
He says "it seems that the existing elite has simply expanded
and been complemented by an additional 'digital elite'." (p. 22)
Though the old-school elite still holds some aces up their sleeves in
order to keep this new 'digital elite', respectively digital natives,
under control. This is for instance, according to Wagner, reflected in
the ways the media keeps producing and sustaining stereotypes of the
unsocial nerd, which makes it possible to easily stigmatise subversive
elements such as Mr. Assange.</p>
<p>Analysing the effects of this newly gained power, Wagner looks at the
norms set up by digital natives. Instead of pining down a list of
certain norms, he has a much better approach by saying:</p>
<p>[T]he tools provided by the internet have unmasked pre-existing norms
which were not previously evident. The tools of the internet bring
these norms to the surface by allowing for their practise an
environment which seems to offer endless opportunities to those
connected to it. (p. 24)</p>
<p>So we’re dealing with a new playground on which the digital natives
seem to dominate the rule defining process. This makes it problematic
for the political system, as its purpose is to keep social order and
also to acknowledge, reflect and integrate certain shifts of norms. As
an example for such a critical discourse, Wagner refers to the rise of
the Pirate Party.</p>
<p>However, this establishment of a new social order is strongly
correlated with a re-bordering of knowledge, as Wagner states. On the
one hand there are those who seek to open up knowledge borders by for
example sharing files, while on the other hand there are those who call
for more restrictions because they fear a digital "wild west culture"
(p. 26) or a destruction of their position. Both sides have valid
points, and Wagner correctly highlights the conflict a society faces
when this re-bordering process "takes place outside of realms where it
can be contested." (p. 28)</p>
<p>This review is part of the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.facebook.com/events/235958519806737/">Tweet-a-Review</a> event organized by the ‘Digital Natives with a Cause? Project and is republished here from <a class="external-link" href="http://gottloburrhythm.tumblr.com/post/13206125040/on-natives-norms-and-knowledge">Philip Ketzel’s blog</a>.<br /><br /></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/on-natives-and-norms'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/on-natives-and-norms</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaDigital Natives2011-12-23T04:40:10ZNews ItemDigital Native: Twin Manifestations or Co-Located Hybrids
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/twin-manifestations
<b>Samuel Tettner reviews ‘Digital Natives and the Return of the Local Cause’ from Book 1: To Be. The essay is authored by Anat Ben-David.</b>
<p>Ben-David’s piece is a well-articulated and informed attempt to
resolve two of the several conceptual fuzziness of the term “Digital
Native”. She attempts this in a philosophical manner: trying to move
away from the ontological “who are Digital Natives?” to an
epistemological “when and where are Digital Natives?” Her reasoning is
that this perceptive change will allow us to unpack the duplicity of a
hybrid term and to understand if it refers to a unique phenomenon in the
world worth exploring.</p>
<p>To answer the when and the where, Ben-David situates the term into
its constituencies: digital and native, contextualizing the words using
two approaches; historiographical (when) for the digital and
geopolitical (where) for the native.</p>
<p>The digital is semantically pin-pointed in the short but active
history of information technology within an activism framework, to use a
broad word. The author then places two events side to one: First the
1999 manifestations against World-trade Organization protests in Seattle
and then the 2011 Tahir Square protests in Egypt. Are these two
phenomena different in nature? Is Tahir Square a more technologically
advanced version of Seattle? Are the basic mechanisms the same, albeit
with new faces and shinier phones?</p>
<p>Ben-David postulates three reasons for placing the manifestations on a
different trajectory. First, “The Internet” of 1999 and “The Internet”
of 2011 are distinctively not the same thing. The second is that the
demographic constituting the protest are not the same: in 1999 they were
mostly Civic Society Organization (CSO) employees and volunteers, while
in Tahrir they were mostly civilians and concerned citizens connected
through their local networks.</p>
<p>The third concerns the spatial and symbolic nature of the protests.
In Seattle, the protests were against large transnational corporations;
Seattle was chosen because it hosted the World Trade Organization that
year. In Egypt, the protest was directed against local corruption and
concerned itself with local governance issues. Tahir Square was chosen
because the protests were directly about, of and in Egypt.</p>
<p>Which brings us to the where. The ‘Native’ is used by Ben-David to
refer to the ongoing structural shifts towards localized activism
campaigns. This change came with the growing realization that
transnational activism campaigns that tried to effect change across
loosely cohesive cross-sections of the world, tended to lose touch with
their points of origin and remain in suspended animation. Local
campaigns seem to be more responsive and agile, specially in their
ability to enter into dialogues with the needs of local populations. The
spontaneity of action, the granular level of the causes, and the
lowered threshold of the agents and initiators are some of the aspects
Ben-David sees in emergent campaigns, which are critically different
from activism campaigns in the past. </p>
<p>Of course, the location and the time intertwine eventually. A growing
trend in the development of the digital world has been the localization
of frameworks, methodologies and approaches. The author’s use of
Richard Roger’s four stages of the evolution of politics about the web
is outstanding: It shows us without telling us that the distinction
between when and where is purely analytical and that they really are a
single entity of the time-space continuum.</p>
<p>Ben-David succeeds in contextualizing both the digital and the native
as different sides of the same coin: as two manifestations of the
growth and maturation process that technology-mediated activism has been
through over the last 10 years. The result is an internally-consistent
perspective which sees Digital Natives habituating hybrid-timespaces
alongside heterogeneous actors, where the relationship between the local
and the global is contingent, transitory, dynamic – and knowledge can
be transformed and adapted to fit actors and their causes.</p>
<p>This review is part of the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.facebook.com/events/235958519806737/">Tweet-a-Review</a> event organized by the ‘Digital Natives with a Cause? Project and is republished here from <a class="external-link" href="http://tettner.com/post/13298655331/digital-native-twin-manifestations-or-co-located">Samuel Tettner’s blog</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/twin-manifestations'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/twin-manifestations</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaDigital Natives2011-12-23T04:36:40ZNews ItemThe Digital Other
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/the-digital-other
<b>Based on my research on young people in the Global South, I want to explore new ways of thinking about the Digital Native. One of the binaries posited as the Digital ‘Other’ -- ie, a non-Digital Native -- is that of a Digital Immigrant or Settler.</b>
<p>I am not comfortable with these terms and they probably need heavy unpacking if not complete abandonment. Standard caricatures of Digital Others show them as awkward in their new digital ecologies, unable to navigate through this brave new world on their own. They may actually have helped produce digital technology and tools but they are not ‘born digital’ and hence are presumed to always have an outsider’s perspective on the digital world order.</p>
<p>As I’ve interacted with young people in the Global South, one thing suddenly started emerging in dramatic fashion -- that many of the youth working extensively with digital technologies in emerging ICT contexts often shared characteristics of the Digital Other. In countries like India, where the digital realm became accessible and affordable to certain sections of the society as late as 2003, there is a learning curve among youth that does not necessarily match the global thinking on Digital Natives. Even though these young people might be considered Digital Natives, because they are at the center of the digital revolution in their own countries, there is no doubt they are also Digital Others relative to Global North and West conceptions of young people in digital networks.<br /><br />There is a very popular tweet that was making the rounds recently, which suggested that Digital Natives don’t have an account of the digital just like fish don’t have a theory of water -- they take to the digital as fish take to water. In this analogy lies a very important distinction between Digital Others and Digital Natives. Out of necessity, Digital Others have a relationship of production, control and design with the technologies they work with. They have a critical engagement with technology, as they code, hack, design, and create protocols and digital environments to suit their needs and resources. Digital Natives, on the other hand, have a purely consumption based interaction with the technology they use.<br /><br />I want to repeat that. The Digital Natives I’ve observed have a purely consumption based interaction with the technologies they use. I know this sounds weird in the face of widespread perceptions that Digital Natives have participatory, engaged, intuitive relationships with technology. We are supposed to be living in prosumer times, where the user on the Infobahn is a consumer and producer of information. But Web 2.0 entities like Facebook have created a business where the user is not just consuming but indeed the user is the consumed. While Facebook and Twitter revolutions are interesting in how users have been able to ‘abuse’ information censorship and create new communities of political protest, we still have to remember that the technologies that supported these revolutions were closed, proprietary, and coercive -- often even putting users in danger.<br /><br />From my perspective and my research, we have conflated access to information with access to technology, and we have misread this increased access as a sign of intimate relationship with digital technology and the Internet. However, for many youth, media production and information sharing are actually merely forms of consumption.<br /><br />What is most alarming to me is that the individual’s relationship with original production and design of technology is on the decline. More and more, technology platforms and apps that Digital Natives interact with are closed hardware and software systems. Private corporations produce and shape the tools of interaction, producing seductive interfaces and information engagement choices that make opaque the actual working of the technologies we use. I am concerned that, increasingly, Digital Natives are acting as pure consumers of technology and gadgets, and seem willing to do so.</p>
<p>Banner image credit: World Bank Photo Collection <a class="external-link" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldbank/3492673512/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldbank/3492673512/</a></p>
<p>Nishant wrote the original blog post in DML Central. Read it <a class="external-link" href="http://dmlcentral.net/blog/nishant-shah/digital-other">here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/the-digital-other'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/the-digital-other</a>
</p>
No publishernishantDigital subjectivitiesResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-05-14T12:07:42ZBlog Entry Digital Native Video Contest Announcement
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/video-contest-event-original
<b>The Centre for Internet & Society and Hivos Knowledge Programme are pleased to announce the Everyday Digital Native (Digital AlterNatives) Video Contest. </b>
<p>The Everyday Digital Native is hiding inside each of us.</p>
<p>You THINK Digital. <br />You CONNECT using digital devices and gadgets.<br />You ACT Digitally, always clicking, linking, tagging and Liking.<br />You know what it means To Be Digital. It's simply a way of life!<br />Tell us your Digital Story. What makes your life so click-worthy?</p>
<p>Submit your proposal via Online Application Form (<a class="external-link" href="https://www.research.net/s/BZXQPHL">https://www.research.net/s/BZXQPHL</a>) by 26 January 2012</p>
<p><b>WINNING PRIZE: EUR 500 each for TOP 10 VIDEO FINALISTS!!<br /></b></p>
<h2>Selection Process</h2>
<ul>
<li> Round 1: Contest entries closes on 26 January</li>
<li>Round 2: The jury will shortlist 20 entries</li>
<li>Round 3: The 20 shortlisted participants send in their final videos by 10 March </li>
<li>Round 4: Public voting for Top 10 videos. <b>Voting closes: 31 March 2012</b>.</li>
<li>Top 10 Finalists win EUR 500 each!</li>
<li>Round 5: Jury Selects <b>Top 2 Winners</b>: 10 April </li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<h2>Submission Guidelines</h2>
<ol>
<li>Use this <a class="external-link" href="https://www.research.net/s/BZXQPHL">Online Application Form </a>to submit your proposals</li>
<li>Participants wishing to submit a sketch(es), storyboard, collage or short video narration at the proposal stage can send in their submissions to <a class="external-link" href="mailto:digitalnatives@cis-india.org">digitalnatives@cis-india.org</a>. Please ensure your submission is accompanied by a brief explanatory write-up.</li>
<li>For team / group submissions, it is enough for one team member to fill the online form / submit proposal via email on behalf of the team.</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/events/contests/blog/dnbook" class="external-link">The Digital AlterNatives with a Cause</a> books are the inspiration for this video contest. You can use any of the essays as a basis for your video.</li>
<li><b>File type</b>: AVI, MP4 formats</li>
<li><b>Language</b>: Please send proposals / fill the online form in English. The final videos can be in any language, with English subtitles.</li>
<li><b>Title</b>: Each proposal should feature a tentative title, short description of what the video will feature (characterization, storyline) and the theme and idea behind the video. </li>
<li><b>Genre</b>: Do mention the style of execution / genre: animation, claymation, stick drawings stitched together in Movie Maker, paper art on video, documentary, short film, promotional message, and other styles of digital movie making.</li>
<li><b>Contact Details</b>: Be sure to include your name and contact email, your city of residence and a two-liner on what you do to give us a perspective on your video. </li>
<li>Limit your written proposals to 350-500 words, although there’s no word limit strictly.</li>
<li>Your video shouldn’t exceed 30 minutes in run time, so fine-tune your ideas and storyboard accordingly </li>
<li>Every applicant is allowed only one proposal. No multiple story submissions.</li>
<li>Applicants can work individually or in a pair or a group. Each group will be permitted one entry submission.</li>
<li>All submissions must be original and clearly attributed to the relevant copyright holder. If referenced from third-party sources or if work is licensed under Creative Commons, please mention so.</li>
</ol>
<h2>Jury Members</h2>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<h3><b>Shashwati Talukdar</b></h3>
<p>Shashwati Talukdar grew up in India where her engagement with theatre and sculpture led to filmmaking, and a Masters degree from the AJ Kidwai Mass Communication Research Center in Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She developed an interest in American Avant-Garde film and eventually got an MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University, Philadelphia (1999). Her work covers a wide range of forms, including documentary, narrative and experimental. Her work has shown at venues including the Margaret Mead Festival, Berlin, Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Kiasma Museum of Art and the Whitney Biennial. She has been supported by entities including the Asian Cine Fund in Busan, the Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts among others.</p>
</td>
<td><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/ShashwatiTalukdar.jpg/image_preview" title="Shashwati" height="115" width="98" alt="Shashwati" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<h3><b>Leon Tan </b></h3>
<p>Leon Tan, PhD, is a media-art historian, cultural theorist and psychoanalyst based in Gothenburg, Sweden. He has written on art, media, globalization and copyright in journals such as CTheory and Ephemera, and curated media-art projects and art symposia in international sites such as KHOJ International Artists’ Association (New Delhi, 2011), ISEA (Singapore, 2008) and Digital Arts Week (Zurich, 2007). He is currently researching media-art practices in India, and networked museums as an expanded field of cultural memory making.</p>
</td>
<td><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/LeonTan.jpg/image_preview" title="Leon Tan" height="142" width="103" alt="Leon Tan" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<h3><b>Jeroen van Loon </b></h3>
<h3></h3>
<p>Jeroen, digital media artist, investigates the (non-) impact of digital technology on our lives. For two months he went analogue, refrained from connecting to the World Wide Web, and communicated through his Analogue Blog. He is currently working on Life Needs Internet in which he travels around the world and collects people's personal handwritten internet stories.</p>
</td>
<td><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/JeroenvanLoon.jpg/image_preview" title="Jeroen" height="128" width="106" alt="Jeroen" class="image-inline image-inline" /><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<h3><b>Becky Band Jain</b></h3>
<p>Becky Band Jain is a non-profit communications specialist and blogs on everything from technology to psychology and culture. She spent the last five years living in India and she’s now based in New York. She’s a dedicated yoga and meditation practitioner and is passionate about ICTD and new media.</p>
</td>
<td><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/BeckyBandJain.jpg/image_preview" title="Becky" height="134" width="107" alt="Becky" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<h3><b>Namita A Malhotra</b></h3>
<p>Namita A. Malhotra is a legal researcher and media practitioner and a core member of Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore, India. Her areas of interest are image, technology, media and law, and her work takes the form of interdisciplinary research, video and film making and exploring possibilities of recombining material, practice and discipline. She is also a founder member of Pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive) which is a densely annotated online video archive.</p>
</td>
<td><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/NamitaMalhotra.jpg/image_preview" title="Namita" height="156" width="104" alt="Namita" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/video-contest-event-original'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/video-contest-event-original</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaDigital Natives2012-03-13T11:07:53ZEventPathways 3rd Faculty Workshop & Regional Facilitators Meeting at CSCS
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways-third-faculty-workshop
<b>The third annual faculty workshop and regional facilitators meeting is being organised by HEIRA and CIS at the CSCS office in Bangalore from 8 to 10 December 2011. This is a closed event. </b>
<h2><br /></h2>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Day 1: December 8, 2011</h2>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<h3>Title</h3>
</td>
<td>
<h3>Moderators & Resource Persons</h3>
</td>
<td>
<h3>Timings</h3>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<strong>Introductory Session</strong>
<ol><li>New Pathways Design</li><li>Campus Projects</li></ol>
</td>
<td>Tejaswini Niranjana<br />Sneha PP<br /></td>
<td>10.00 - 10.45 a.m.<br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<strong>Need for Curricular Reform and Innovation</strong>
<ol><li>Changing social composition of the UG classroom</li><li>Alternative sites of knowledge production</li><li>New curricular objectives</li></ol>
</td>
<td>S.V. Srinivas<br />Milind Wakankar<br />Maithreyi Mulupuru<br /></td>
<td>10.45 - 11.30 a.m.<br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<strong>Exploring the Potential of Curricular Innovation in the UG Space</strong>
<ol><li>Curricular experiments at the UG level<br /></li></ol>
</td>
<td>Initial Inputs by Nishant Shah & Tejaswini Niranjana, followed by Group Discussion</td>
<td>11.30 - 12.30 p.m.<br /><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Lunch</strong></td>
<td> </td>
<td>12.30 p.m. - 1.00 p.m.<br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<strong>Group Activity: Designing a certificate course/module</strong></td>
<td> </td>
<td>1.30 p.m. - 3.00 p.m.<br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<strong>Group Reports and Discussion</strong></td>
<td> </td>
<td>3.00 p.m. - 4.00 p.m.<br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<strong>Meeting at IIMB</strong></td>
<td> </td>
<td>5.00 p.m. - 6.30 p.m.<br /></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<h2>Day 2: December 9, 2011</h2>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<h3>Title</h3>
</td>
<td>
<h3>Speakers/Moderators</h3>
</td>
<td>
<h3>Timings</h3>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Issues for a New Pedagogy</strong><br />
<ol><li>Social and linguistic barriers in the classroom</li><li>Lack of emphasis on critical and analytical skills</li><li>Need for student-driven learning</li></ol>
</td>
<td>Ashwin Kumar<br /><br />Tejaswini Niranjana<br /><br />Nishant Shah<br /></td>
<td>10.00 a.m - 11.00 a.m.<br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>New Teaching Resources for the UG Space</strong><br />
<ol><li>Local Context & Resources – the language issue</li><li>Building research capacity</li></ol>
<br /></td>
<td>AK<br /><br />Milind Wakankar<br />(Discussants: SB,TH & AJ)</td>
<td>11.00 a.m. - 11.45 a.m.<br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Innovative Teaching Methods</strong><br />
<ol><li>-New methods of classroom teaching</li><li>-Digital media in teaching</li><li>-Assessing classroom practices (Questionnaire)</li></ol>
</td>
<td> S.V. Srinivas<br /><br />Nishant Shah<br /><br />MG Hegde & Geethika G. (Discussants)<br /><br />Tanveer Hasan<br /></td>
<td>11.45 a.m - 12.45 p.m.<br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Lunch</strong></td>
<td> </td>
<td>1.15 p.m. - 2.00 p.m.<br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Group Activity: Developing New Teaching Methods for the new course developed on Day 1 </strong><br /></td>
<td> </td>
<td>2.00 p.m. - 3.00 p.m.<br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Group Discussion: Pathways Campus Projects </strong><br /></td>
<td> </td>
<td>3.00 p.m. - 4.30 p.m.<br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Final Round-Table Discussion and Concluding Remarks</strong></td>
<td> </td>
<td>4.30 p.m. - 5.00 p.m.<br /></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<h3>Speakers/ Moderators and Discussants</h3>
<ol><li>Abhilash J (Regional Facilitator -Kerala)</li><li>Ashwin Kumar (Initiative Head – Regional Language Resources, HEIRA)</li><li>Maithreyi Mulupuru (Research Associate, HEIRA)</li><li>Milind Wakankar (Initiative Head -Social Justice in HE, HEIRA & Fellow, CSCS)</li><li>Nishant Shah (Director – Research, CIS)</li><li>Shrikant Botre (Regional Facilitator – Maharashtra)</li><li>Sneha PP ( Programme Associate, HEIRA)</li><li>S.V. Srinivas (Senior Fellow, CSCS & Lead Researcher, CIDASIA)</li><li>Tanveer Hasan (Regional Facilitator – Karnataka)</li><li>Tejaswini Niranjana (Senior Fellow, CSCS & Lead Researcher, HEIRA)</li><li>Dr. MG Hegde (Dept. of English, Dr. A.V Baliga College, Kumta)</li><li>Geethika G (Dept. of Political Science, Union Christian College, Aluva)<br /><br /></li></ol>
<h2>Day 3: December 10, 2011</h2>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Title</td>
<td>Speakers/Moderators</td>
<td>Timings</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>HEIRA and Knowledge Potential</strong></td>
<td>Tejaswini Niranjana, Milind Wakankar</td>
<td> 10.30 a.m. - 11.30 a.m.<br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Facilitators' Cases:</strong><br />
<ul><li>Steps to Conduct a Survey in Ahmednagar College</li></ul>
<ul><li>Kumta Ethnographic Project </li></ul>
<br /></td>
<td><br />Shrikant Botre<br />Tanveer Hasan<br />(Discussant: Abhilash J)<br /></td>
<td> 11.30 a.m. - 1.00 p.m.<br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Lunch</strong></td>
<td> </td>
<td>1.00 p.m. - 2.00 p.m.<br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Relays between Current and Future Projects</strong></td>
<td>Ashwin Kumar, Nishant Shah<br />(Feedback: Arun Kumar)<br /></td>
<td>2.00 p.m - 2.45 p.m.<br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Possible Convergences between HEIRA projects</strong></td>
<td>(Feedback: Arun Kumar)</td>
<td>2.45 p.m - 3.30 p.m.<br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Final Round of Discussion & Concluding Remarks <br /></strong></td>
<td> </td>
<td>3:30 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. <br /></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<h3>Speakers/ Moderators and Discussants</h3>
<ol><li>Abhilash J</li><li>Ashwin Kumar</li><li>Maithreyi Mulupuru</li><li>Milind Wakankar</li><li>Nishant Shah</li><li>Shrikant Botre</li><li>Sneha PP</li><li>S.V. Srinivas</li><li>Tanveer Hasan</li><li>Tejaswini Niranjana<br /><br /></li></ol>
<h3>College and Participants</h3>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>1</td>
<td>SIES College of Arts, Science and Commerce, Mumbai</td>
<td>
<ul><li>Rupal Vora</li></ul>
<ul><li>Archana Sanil</li></ul>
</td>
<td>Counselling<br />Business Management<br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>2</td>
<td>St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai</td>
<td>
<ul><li>Rashmi Lee George</li></ul>
<ul><li>Girja Balan</li></ul>
</td>
<td>English<br />Life Science<br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>3</td>
<td>Ahmednagar College, Ahmednagar</td>
<td>
<ul><li>B. Eshwar Gouda</li></ul>
<ul><li>A.Y Raikwad</li></ul>
</td>
<td>Commerce<br />Commerce<br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>4</td>
<td>St. Aloysius College, Mangalore</td>
<td>
<ul><li>George Rodrigues</li></ul>
<ul><li>Praveena Cardoza</li></ul>
</td>
<td>Librarian<br />Sociology<br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>5</td>
<td>Vidhyavardhaka First Grade College, Mysore</td>
<td>
<ul><li>Manoj Kumar</li></ul>
<ul><li>R. Arvind</li></ul>
</td>
<td>Commerce<br />English<br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>6</td>
<td>Dr. A V Baliga College of Arts and Science, Kumta ( North Kanara)</td>
<td>
<ul><li>MG Hegde</li></ul>
<ul><li>Pratibha Bhat </li></ul>
</td>
<td>English<br />English<br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>7</td>
<td>Farook College, Kozhikode</td>
<td>
<ul><li>Muhammed Rasheed P</li></ul>
<ul><li>Haris P</li></ul>
</td>
<td>Economics<br />Economics<br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>8</td>
<td>Union Christian College, Aluva</td>
<td>
<ul><li>Geethika</li></ul>
<ul><li>Seena Mathai</li></ul>
</td>
<td>Political Science<br />Psychology<br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>9</td>
<td>Newman College, Thodupuzha</td>
<td>
<ul><li>Louis. J. Parathazham</li></ul>
<ul><li>Saju Abraham</li></ul>
</td>
<td>Physics<br />Botany</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways-third-faculty-workshop'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways-third-faculty-workshop</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaDigital Natives2012-01-04T05:15:45ZEventIn Search of the Other: Decoding Digital Natives
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/in-search-of-the-other-decoding-digital-natives
<b>This is the first post of a research inquiry that questions the ways in which we have understood the Youth-Technology-Change relationship in the contemporary digital world, especially through the identity of ‘Digital Native’. Drawing from three years of research and current engagements in the field, the post begins a critique of how we need to look at the outliers, the people on the fringes in order to unravel the otherwise celebratory nature of discourse about how the digital is changing the world.</b>
<p>In this first post, I chart the trajectories of our research at the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India) and Hivos (The Hague, The Netherlands) to see how alternative models of understanding these relationships can be built.</p>
<p>The Digital Native has many different imaginations. From the short hand understanding of ‘anybody who is born after the 1980s’ (Prensky, 2001) to more nuanced definitions of populations who are ‘born digital’ (Palfrey & Gasser, 2008), the digital native has firmly been ensconced in our visions of technology futures. From DIY decentralized learning environments to viral and networked forms of engagements that span from the Arab Spring to Occupy Together, the Digital Native – somebody who has grown up with digital technologies (and the skills to negotiate with them) as the default mode of being – has become central to how we see usage and proliferation of new digital tools and technologies.</p>
<p>Three years ago, when the identity Digital Native was already in currency but before the overwhelming examples that are now so easily available in the post MENA (Middle East-North Africa) world, we asked ourselves the question: “What does a Digital Native look like?” When we started sifting through the literature (published and grey), practice-based discourse and policy, we started spotting certain patterns: Digital Natives were almost always young, white, (largely male) middle class, affluent, English speaking populations who could afford education and were located in developed Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) contexts of ubiquitous connectivity. These users of technology were treated as the proto-type around which digital natives in the ‘rest of the world’ were imagined. The ‘rest of the world’ was not necessarily an exotic geography elsewhere, but often was a person whose relationships with the digital were impeded by class, education, gender, sexuality, literacy etc.</p>
<p>Moreover, we found that the accounts of Digital Natives that were being discussed across the board were accounts of super stars. They either heralded the digital native as the young messiah who is drastically changing the world, overthrowing governments and building collaborative and participatory structures of openness. Or they feared the digital native as an unthinking, self contained, dysfunctional person who pirates and plagiarizes and needs to be rehabilitated into becoming a civic individual. Very little was said about Everyday Digital Natives – users who, through the presence of digital technologies, were changing their lives on an everyday basis.</p>
<h3>Other Digital Natives</h3>
<p>Based on this, we began the quest for the Other Digital Natives – people who did not necessarily fit the existing models of being digital but who often had to strive to ‘Become Digital’ and in the process produce possibilities and potentials for social change and political participation in their immediate environments. This was the first step to discover what being a digital native would be in emerging ICT contexts, where connectivity, access, usage, affordability, geo-political regulation, and questions of the biological and of living would give us new understandings of what a digital native is. This quest for the Other inspired us to work across Asia, Africa and Latin America, to talk to some of the most strident voices in the region who claimed to be digital natives, expressed discomfort with being called digital natives, refused to be called digital natives, and sought to provide critique of the existing expectations of digital nativity. The proceedings from these conversations in the Global South have been consolidated in the book Digital AlterNatives With a Cause? available for free download.</p>
<p>For this post, I want to look at some of the presumptions in existing understanding of Digital Natives and how we can contest them to build Digital AlterNative identities.</p>
<h3>Presumption 1: Digital Natives are always young</h3>
<p>Even if we go by Mark Prensky’s problematic definition that everybody born after the 1980s is a digital native, we must realize that there is a large chunk of digital native users who are now in their thirties. They are in universities, work forces, governments and offices. They have not only grown older with technologies but they have also radically changed the technologies and tech platforms that they inhabit.</p>
<p>It is time to let go of the Peter-Pan imagination of a Digital Native as always perpetually young. Moreover, we must realize that digital natives existed even before the name ‘Digital Native’ came into existence. There were people who built internets, who might not have been young but were still native to the digital environments that they were a part of.</p>
<p>Instead of looking at a youth-centric, age-based exclusive definition of a digital native, it is more fruitful to say that people who natively interact with digital technologies – people who are able to inhabit the remix, reuse, share cultures that digitality produces, might be marked as digital AlterNatives.</p>
<h3>Presumption 2: Digital Natives are born digital</h3>
<p>It does sound nice – the idea that there were people who were born as preconfigured cyborgs, interacting with interfaces from the minute they were born. And yet, we know that people are taught to interact with technologies. True, technologies often define our own conceptions of who we are and how we perceive the world around us, but there is still a learning curve that is endemic to human technology relationships.</p>
<p>Because of the ubiquitous and pervasive nature of certain kinds of technology mediated interaction, it is sometimes difficult to look at our habits of technology as learned interactions. Recognizing that there is a thrust, an effort and an incentive produced for people to Become Digital, is also to recognize that there are different actors, players, promoters and teachers who help young people enter into relationships with technologies, which can often be greater than the first interactions.</p>
<h3>Presumption 3: Digital Natives live digital lives</h3>
<p>This is a concern voiced by many people who talk about digital natives. They are posited as slacktivists – removed from their material realities and apathetic to the physical world around them. They are painted as dysfunctional screenagers who are unable to sustain the fabric of social interaction and community formation outside of social networking systems. They are discussed as a teenage mutant nightmare that unfolds almost entirely in the domains of the digital.</p>
<p>But these kinds of imaginations forget that a digital native is not primarily a digital native, or at least, not exclusively digital. Being a digital native is one of many identities these users appropriate. The digital often serves as a lens that informs all their other socio-cultural and political interactions, but it is not an all-containing system. The bodies that click on ‘Like’ buttons on Facebook are also often the bodies that fill up the streets to fight for their rights. The division between Physical Reality and Virtual Reality needs to be dismissed to build more comprehensive accounts of digital native practices.</p>
<h3>Presumption 4: Connectivity is digitality</h3>
<p>This is often an easy conflation. It is presumed that once one has constant connectivity, one will automatically become a digital native. Especially in policy and development based approaches, connectivity and access have become the buzzwords by which the digital divide can be breached. However, we have now learned that this one-size, fits-all solution actually fits nobody. Being connected – by building infrastructure and affording gadgets – does not make somebody a digital native.</p>
<p>The digital native identity needs to be more than mere access to the digital. It involves agency, choice, critical literacy and fluency with the digital media that we live with. So instead of thinking of anybody who is connected as a digital native, we are looking at people who are strategically able to harness the powers of the digital to produce a change in their immediate environments. These changes can range from making personal collections of media to mobilising large numbers of people for political protests. To be digital is to be intimately connected with the technologies so that they can augment and amplify the ways in which we respond to the world around us.</p>
<p>I offer these as the building blocks of looking at the ‘Other’ of the Digital Natives as we have discursively produced them. From hereon, in my subsequent posts, I hope to drill deeper to locate nuances and differences, concepts and frameworks that we need to map in order to build a digital native model that is inclusive, differential and context based.</p>
<p>Banner image credit: AFSC Photos <a class="external-link" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/afscphotos/6266795673/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/afscphotos/6266795673/</a></p>
<p>This blog post by Nishant Shah was published in <a class="external-link" href="http://dmlcentral.net/blog/nishant-shah/search-other-decoding-digital-natives">DML central on 24 October 2011</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/in-search-of-the-other-decoding-digital-natives'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/in-search-of-the-other-decoding-digital-natives</a>
</p>
No publishernishantDigital subjectivitiesResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-05-14T12:12:24ZBlog EntryThe Write Stuff
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/write-stuff
<b>“Digital natives are no longer those youngsters who fit in the bracket of a Harvard return professional, glued to their PC all day,” says Nishant Shah, director of research, Centre for Internet and Society, a Bengaluru-based organisation. For Nishant, and many youngsters across the globe, digital natives are not any of those secluded geeks who spend hours on the Internet. “I am a homemaker, yet I am a digital native,” says Nilofer Ansher, a community manager who manages members from across three continents.</b>
<p>A housewife, a young college graduate, a freelance writer, an NGO professional and many other individuals are behind the Internet activist flurry. Digital Natives, Fair Observer, PC Tech Magazine are just a few of the newsletters and forums that are connecting youngsters from across the globe and are mobilising them to do something beyond information gathering.</p>
<p>Youth-related discussions, inventions in make-shift laboratories from the backyards of homes in Nigeria and action against corruption across the globe; these are just some of the activities that these netizens are involved in. “The idea was to build a network of people from across the globe who are passionate about what they do. We are not talking countries, it is all to do with people with similar interests,” says Shah, who collaborated with Hivos to create the online platform called Digital Natives.</p>
<p>The members collaborate online to write about various issues. But these online movements can have serious repercussions, “In fact, Alaa Abdel-Fattah, one of Egypt’s most vocal activists and bloggers, has been detained. He is our team member. We are now running a campaign supporting his early release,” says Ansher who doubles up as a co-editor of one of these newsletters. Various discussions have led to solutions. “My first challenge was to create a communication system for illiterate farmers. But I wanted a definite solution. So another member from mobile active community sent a message and it worked and we are following the same system,” says Ajay Kumar, manager, ICT operations.</p>
<p>This article was published in the Deccan Chronicle on 14 November 2011. It can be read <a class="external-link" href="http://www.deccanchronicle.com/tabloid/all-rounders/write-stuff-655">here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/write-stuff'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/write-stuff</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaDigital Natives2011-11-14T03:32:00ZNews ItemOn 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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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 EntryMaking a difference, online and offline
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/making-difference-online-offline
<b>A new collection examines how technology and issues of connectivity are shaping the lives of ‘digital natives’—and how the Net can influence social change, writes Gopal Sathe in an article published in LiveMint on September 27, 2011.</b>
<p>The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, and The Hague, Netherlands-based Hivos Knowledge Programme recently launched a four- book collection, Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?, edited by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen. Jansen is the knowledge officer for the Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Programme at Hivos. In the book, researchers look at the identities, networks, actions and role of the “digital” generation. The researchers talked to people identified as “digital natives” about the way in which the Internet has shaped the way they interact with the world. We spoke to Nishant Shah, co-founder and director-research for the Centre for Internet and Society, about the collection. Edited excerpts:</p>
<p><strong>The research this book talks about is based mostly in other countries, such as Chile, Taiwan and South Africa. How does this connect to the situation in India?</strong></p>
<p>The researchers looked at young people’s use of digital technologies to make changes in their immediate environments within the information landscape of the “Global South” (countries with low to medium rankings in the human development index). We were interested in looking at macro structures that would help us understand what is happening globally.</p>
<p>We did not impose our frameworks and concepts on the communities we were working with. Hence, we did not have the expected discussions of digital divides and digital access. What they found interesting across locations was the question of connectivity and dis-connectivity. In the ubiquitous, unforgetting world of the Internet, we leave traces all the time. This incessant connectivity can come with its own pressures, problems and repercussions, and hence there were discussions around “right to disconnect”, “right to be forgotten” and “right to be non-digital”.</p>
<p>In the early 1990s, there were people who did not have phones, could not make national and international phone calls and had poor communication infrastructure—that changed in less than 10 years. Instead of focusing on access and infrastructure, it became more important to look at the ways in which they shape people’s usage, behaviour, engagement with technology, and with their larger physical realities.</p>
<p><strong>When we consider the “digital landscape” of India, whom are we really discussing?</strong></p>
<p>Popular definitions—somebody who is born with technologies, who did not have to make a transition to digital—are inadequate to account for the realities we experience every day. We made a more inclusive identity, which gets inflected by questions of age, sex, location, class and politics, et al.</p>
<p>The way we understand a digital native now is somebody whose life has been significantly restructured because of their relationship with digital technologies and their ability to see the potentials of change in these technologies. Just having access to digital technologies is not enough. Their purposes, causes, ambitions, intentions are what is going to change the way they use technologies. People are not “born digital” but they “become digital” and the processes of becoming digital are more complex than merely getting access.</p>
<p>New devices and cheaper connections have granted access to a huge number of people—what impact has this had on people’s choices?</p>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
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<td> <img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Nishant.jpg/image_preview" alt="Ns" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Ns" /></td>
<td>
<p>The “natives” belong to different communities, families and regions. They are influenced by the cultural practices in their everyday life. They depend on different structures of work for their economic survival. They live in differently marked political regimes—from the extreme liberal to the highly authoritarian. Their ways of thinking and engagement, influenced by their practices online, change the larger realities within which they live. For example, digital natives who are used to the peer-to-peer processes of knowledge production online are already changing the ways in which classroom learning is happening in schools around the country. </p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<div>At the same time, the larger structures of education, literacy, economic choices, cultural productions like TV and cinema, all influence the content and expectations from the Internet as well. What really matters is how the capacities and capabilities of one medium, the digital, for example, influence and are influenced by the experiences and knowledge in the other—the physical, for instance.</div>
<div> </div>
<div><strong>Would the addition of more Indian-language content on the Internet make a difference to the digital landscape in India? Would it spur greater engagement and therefore have a bigger impact? Is this what’s holding back technologies like telemedicine and distance education?</strong></div>
<div> </div>
<div>There are many user-generated content platforms like Wikipedia and other blogging platforms like WordPress that are promoting the localization of content. It is good that we are offering some resistance to the very quick “Englification” of the online world. But with the current flow of globalization, there is no denying the fact that English is a language with the highest currency and that in our physical realities, it is getting a stronghold in our everyday practices.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>The Internet is a tool, a process, a technology but not a solution. The mere presence of the Internet is not going to lead to social change. Just introducing the Internet to existing structures is only going to lead to a more flawed model of development.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>For example, telemedicine has exciting possibilities but the basic problem of healthcare is not the unavailability of medical resources. What is missing is a universal health Bill to make it affordable to all.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>This is why in this book, we pay specific attention to how and why people engage in processes of change. We have been trying to address the questions of how people see themselves as agents of social change and what are the ways in which digital and Internet technologies enable them to make changes in their immediate environments.</div>
<div> </div>
<p>Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? is available as a free download at <a class="external-link" href="http://www.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook">http://www.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook</a>.</p>
<div>Read the original story published in LiveMint <a class="external-link" href="http://www.livemint.com/2011/09/27210021/Making-a-difference-online-an.html">here</a></div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/making-difference-online-offline'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/making-difference-online-offline</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaDigital Natives2011-09-28T07:09:35ZNews ItemSeptember 2011 Bulletin
http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/september-2011-bulletin
<b>Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! In this issue we are pleased to present you the latest updates about our research, upcoming events, and news and media coverage that happened in the month of September 2011.</b>
<h2><b>Researchers@Work</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">RAW is a multidisciplinary research initiative. CIS believes that in order to understand the contemporary concerns in the field of Internet and society, it is necessary to produce local and contextual accounts of the interaction between the Internet and socio-cultural and geo-political structures. To build original research base, the RAW programme has been collaborating with different organizations and individuals in order to focus on its two year thematic of Histories of the Internets in India. Five monographs were recently launched at a workshop, <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/workshop">Locating Internets: Histories of the Internet(s) in India — Research Training and Curriculum</a> held in Ahmedabad from 19 to 22 August 2011.</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/rewiring-bodies">Re:Wiring Bodies</a> by Asha Achuthan</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/last-cultural-mile">The Last Cultural Mile</a> by Ashish Rajadhyaksha</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/porn-law-video-technology">Porn: Law, Video, Technology</a> by Namita A Malhotra </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/archives-and-access">Archives and Access</a> by Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/internet-society-space">Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities</a> by Pratyush Shankar</li>
</ul>
<p><b> </b></p>
<h2><b>Digital Natives with a Cause?</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Digital Natives with a Cause? is a knowledge programme initiated by CIS, India and Hivos, Netherlands. It is a research inquiry that seeks to look at the changing landscape of social change and political participation and the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who want to critically engage with the dominant discourse on youth, technology and social change, in order to look at the alternative practices and ideas in the Global South. It also aims at building new ecologies that amplify and augment the interventions and actions of the digitally young as they shape our futures.</p>
<h3>Featured Publication</h3>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook">Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?</a> - This collaboratively produced collective, edited by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen, asks critical and pertinent questions about theory and practice around ‘digital revolutions’ in a post MENA (Middle East - North Africa) world. It works with multiple vocabularies and frameworks and produces dialogues and conversations between digital natives, academic and research scholars, practitioners, development agencies and corporate structures to examine the nature and practice of digital natives in emerging contexts from the Global South.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Book Review</h3>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-alternatives-book-review">Digital (Alter)Natives with a Cause? — Book Review by Maarten van den Berg</a> - 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, writes Maarten van den Berg. The review was published in "<a href="http://www.thebrokeronline.eu/Articles/Digital-Alter-Natives">The Broker</a>" on 19 September 2011.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Event Organised</h3>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/events/book-launch">Digital AlterNatives book launch</a> – CIS and Hivos launched this book at the Museum for Communication, Hague on 16 September 2011.</li>
</ul>
<h2><b>Accessibility</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Estimates of the percentage of the world's population that is disabled vary considerably. But what is certain is that if we count functional disability, then a large proportion of the world's population is disabled in one way or another. At CIS we work to ensure that the digital technologies, which empower disabled people and provide them with independence, are allowed to do so in practice and by the law. To this end, we support web accessibility guidelines, and change in copyright laws that currently disempower the persons with disabilities.</p>
<h3>Event Participated</h3>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/usof-meeting">Stakeholders Meeting of the USOF on Facilitating ICT Access to Persons with Disabilities in Rural Areas</a>, on 7 September 2011. Nirmita Narasimhan made a presentation.</li>
</ul>
<h2><b>Access to Knowledge</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Access to Knowledge is a campaign to promote the fundamental principles of justice, freedom, and economic development. It deals with issues like copyrights, patents, and trademarks, which are an important part of the digital landscape. CIS believes that access to knowledge and culture is essential, and such access promotes creativity and innovation, and helps bridge the differences between the developing and developed worlds in a positive manner. Towards this end, CIS is campaigning for an international treaty on copyright exceptions for print-challenged people, advocating against laws (such as the PUPFIP Bill) that privatize public-funded knowledge, call for the WIPO Broadcast Treaty to be restricted to broadcast, question the demonization of 'pirates', and support endeavours that explore and question the current copyright regime.</p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<h3>New Blog Entries</h3>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blog/copyright-bill-parliament">Copyright Amendment Bill in Parliament</a> by Nirmita Narasimhan, 30 August 2011.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/photocopying-the-past">Photocopying the past</a> by Sunil Abraham in the Indian Express, 2 September 2011.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/calling-out-the-bsa-on-bs">Calling Out the BSA on Its BS</a> by Pranesh Prakash, 9 September 2011.</li>
</ul>
<p><b> </b></p>
<h2><b>Internet Governance</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Internet technologies have fundamentally questioned the notion of governance, not only at the level of administration but also at the level of mechanisms of control, regulation and shaping of the individual. e-Governance initiatives, in combination with other regimes of surveillance, control and censorship, are redefining what it means to be a citizen, a subject, and an individual. We look at questions of governance — at the micro level of the individual and the private (family, relationships, community structures, etc.) as well as the level of governmentality — at the macro level of nation state, citizenship, market economies, and the public (spaces of consumption, work, leisure, political engagement, etc.) under the umbrella of digital governance.</p>
<h3>New Blog Entry</h3>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/understanding-right-to-information">Understanding the Right to Information</a> by Elonnai Hickok, 28 September 2011.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Events Organised</h3>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/events/internet-as-a-tool-for-political-change">Using the Internet as a Tool for Political Change: Lessons Learned and Way Forward</a>, IGF, Nairobi, 27 September 2011. </li>
</ul>
<h2><b>Telecom</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The growth in telecommunications in India has been impressive. While the potential for growth and returns exist, a range of issues need to be addressed for this potential to be realized. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the second aspect is a countrywide access to broadband which is low at about eight million subscriptions. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum. It is imperative to resolve these issues in the common interest of users and service providers.</p>
<h3>Articles by Shyam Ponappa</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Shyam Ponappa is a Distinguished Fellow at CIS. He writes regularly on Telecom issues in the Business Standard and these articles are mirrored on the CIS website.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/reviving-growth">Reviving Growth</a>, published in the Business Standard on 1 September 2011.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Event Organised</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/events/open-spectrum-for-development-in-the-context-of-the-digital-migration">Open Spectrum for Development in the Context of the Digital Migration</a>, IGF, Nairobi, 29 September 2011.</li>
</ul>
<p><b> </b></p>
<h2><b>Miscellaneous</b></h2>
<h3>Film Screening</h3>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/events/partners-in-crime">Screening of Partners in Crime</a>, Vikalp@Smriti Nandan along with CIS screened the film and followed it with a discussion with the director of the film, Paromita Vohra, Smriti Nandan Cultural Centre, 9 September 2011.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/workshop-rsa-encryption">Prime Security: The Mathematics of RSA Encryption</a>, a one-day workshop with Rohit Gupta, a leading Mathematician.</li>
</ul>
<p><b> </b></p>
<h2><b>News & Media Coverage</b></h2>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/social-media-masks-forgotten-protests">India's social media "spring" masks forgotten protests</a> [Alistair Scrutton in Reuters, 25 August 2011].</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/social-media-key-to-hazare-success">Social media holds the key to Hazare's campaign success</a> [Alistair Scrutton in NEWS.scotsman.com, 26 August 2011].</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/digital-divide">Digital divide: Why Irom Sharmila can’t do an Anna</a> [FirstPost.Ideas, 25 August 2011].</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/revolutions-viral?searchterm=When+revolutions+go+viral+">When revolutions go viral</a> [Times of India (Crescent Edition), 27 August 2011].</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/ibsa-seminar">IBSA Seminar on Global Internet Governance</a>, organised by the Brazilian Ministry of External Relations, with support from the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br) and the Center for Technology & Society (CTS/FGV) and governmental and non- governmental actors from India, Brazil and South Africa, 1 to 2 September 2011, Fundacao Getulio Vargas (FGV) - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Pranesh Prakash participated in this event.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/copyright-amendment-bill-in-indian-parliament">Copyrights Amendment Bill to Be Tabled in Indian Parliament – Parallel Import provisions have Been Removed</a> [Mike Palmedo in infojustice.org, 5 September 2011]</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/power-of-information">The Power of Information: New Technologies for Philanthropy and Development</a> [Indigo Trust, 15 September 2011]. Sunil Abraham participated in this event. A video of his speech is now available on <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhpLkEhn9AY">YouTube</a>.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/using-social-media-to-understand-peoples-pulse">Planning Commission, Census 2011 and India Post using social media to understand people's pulse better</a> [Vikas Kumar in the Economic Times, 20 September 2011]</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/foss-instrument-for-accessible-development">The Impact of Regulation: FOSS and Enterprise</a>, organised by FOSSFA and ICFOSS, IGF, Nairobi, 28 September 2011. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/privacy-security-access-to-rights">Privacy, Security, and Access to Rights: A Technical and Policy Analyses</a>, organised by Expression Technologies, IGF, Nairobi, 29 September 2011. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/how-can-privacy-be-protected">Putting Users First: How Can Privacy be Protected in Today’s Complex Mobile Ecosystem?</a>, organised by GSM Association, 29 September 2011.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/truman-show-in-kerala">The Truman Show, in Kerala</a> [Times of India, posted on CIS website on 23 September 2011].</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/making-difference-online-offline">Making a difference, online and offline</a> [LiveMint, 27 September 2011].</li>
</ul>
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<li style="text-align: justify; ">Get short, timely messages from us on <a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=456&qid=46981" target="_blank">Twitter</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Follow CIS on <a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=457&qid=46981" target="_blank">identi.ca</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Join the CIS group on <a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=458&qid=46981" target="_blank">Facebook</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Visit us at <a href="http://crm.cis-india.org/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=459&qid=46981" target="_blank">www.cis-india.org</a></li>
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<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>CIS is grateful to Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.</i></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/september-2011-bulletin'>http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/september-2011-bulletin</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaAccess to KnowledgeDigital NativesTelecomAccessibilityInternet GovernanceCISRAW2012-07-30T06:34:19ZPageDigital (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 ItemDigital AlterNatives with a Cause?
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook
<b>Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society have consolidated their three year knowledge inquiry into the field of youth, technology and change in a four book collective “Digital AlterNatives with a cause?”. This collaboratively produced collective, edited by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen, asks critical and pertinent questions about theory and practice around 'digital revolutions' in a post MENA (Middle East - North Africa) world. It works with multiple vocabularies and frameworks and produces dialogues and conversations between digital natives, academic and research scholars, practitioners, development agencies and corporate structures to examine the nature and practice of digital natives in emerging contexts from the Global South. </b>
<p></p>
<p><strong>I</strong><strong>ntroduction</strong></p>
<p>In the 21<sup>st</sup>
Century, we have witnessed the simultaneous growth of internet and digital
technologies on the one hand, and political protests and mobilisation on the
other. Processes of interpersonal relationships, social communication, economic
expansion, political protocols and governmental mediation are undergoing a
significant transition, across in the world, in developed and emerging
Information and Knowledge societies.</p>
<p>The young
are often seen as forerunners of these changes because of the pervasive and
persistent presence of digital and online technologies in their lives. The “
Digital Natives with a Cause?” is a research inquiry that uncovers the ways in
which young people in emerging ICT contexts make strategic use of technologies
to bring about change in their immediate environments. Ranging from personal
stories of transformation to efforts at collective change, it aims to identify
knowledge gaps that existing scholarship, practice and popular discourse around
an increasing usage, adoption and integration of digital technologies in
processes of social and political change.</p>
<p><strong>Methodology</strong></p>
<p>In 2010-11,
three workshops in Taiwan, South Africa and Chile, brought together around 80
people who identified themselves as Digital Natives from Asia, Africa and Latin
America, to explore certain key questions that could provide new insight into
Digital Natives research, policy and practice. The workshops were accompanied
by a ‘Thinkathon’ – a multi-stakeholder summit that initiated conversations
between Digital Natives, academic researchers, scholars, practitioners,
educators, policy makers and corporate representatives to share learnings on
new questions: Is one born digital or does one become a Digital Native? How do
we understand our relationship with the idea of a Digital Native? How do
Digital Natives redefine ‘change’ and how do they see themselves implementing
it? What is the role that technologies play in defining civic action and social
movements? What are the relationships
that these technology based identities and practices have with existing social
movements and political legacies? How do we build new frameworks of sustainable
citizen action outside of institutionalisation?</p>
<strong>
</strong>
<p><strong>Rationale</strong></p>
<p>One of the
knowledge gaps that this book tries to address is the lack of digital natives’
voices in the discourse around them. In the occasions that they are a part of
the discourse, they are generally represented by other actors who define the
frameworks and decide the issues which are important. Hence, more often than
not, most books around digital natives concentrate on similar sounding areas
and topics, which might not always resonate with the concerns that digital
natives and other stake-holders might be engaged with in their material and
discursive practice. The methodology of the workshops was designed keeping this
in mind. Instead of asking the digital natives to give their opinion or recount
a story about what we felt was important, we began by listening to their
articulations about what was at stake for them as e-agents of change. As a
result, the usual topics like piracy, privacy, cyber-bullying, sexting etc.
which automatically map digital natives discourse, are conspicuously absent
from this book. Their absence is not deliberate, but more symptomatic of how
these themes that we presumed as important were not of immediate concerns to
most of the participants in the workshop who are contributing to the book<strong>.</strong></p>
<strong>
</strong>
<p><strong>Structure</strong></p>
<p>The
conversations, research inquiries, reflections, discussions, interviews, and
art practices are consolidated in this four part book which deviates from the
mainstream imagination of the young people involved in processes of change. The
alternative positions, defined by geo-politics, gender, sexuality, class,
education, language, etc. find articulations from people who have been engaged
in the practice and discourse of technology mediated change. Each part
concentrates on one particular theme that helps bring coherence to a wide
spectrum of style and content.</p>
<p><strong>Book 1: To Be: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/dnbook1/at_download/file" class="external-link">here</a></strong></p>
<strong>
</strong>
<p>The first
part, <em>To Be</em>, looks at the questions
of digital native identities. Are digital natives the same everywhere? What
does it mean to call a certain population ‘Digital Natives”? Can we also look
at people who are on the fringes – Digital Outcasts, for example? Is it
possible to imagine technology-change relationships not only through questions
of access and usage but also through personal investments and transformations?
The contributions help chart the history, explain the contemporary and give ideas
about what the future of technology mediated identities is going to be.</p>
<strong>Book 2: To Think: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/dnbook2/at_download/file" class="external-link">here</a></strong><strong>
</strong>
<p>In the
second section, <em>To Think,</em> the
contributors engage with new frameworks of understanding the processes,
logistics, politics and mechanics of digital natives and causes. Giving fresh
perspectives which draw from digital aesthetics, digital natives’ everyday
practices, and their own research into the design and mechanics of technology
mediated change, the contributors help us re-think the concepts, processes and
structures that we have taken for granted. They also nuance the ways in which
new frameworks to think about youth, technology and change can be evolved and
how they provide new ways of sustaining digital natives and their causes.</p>
<p><strong>Book 3: To Act: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/dnbook3/at_download/file" class="external-link">here</a></strong></p>
<p><em>To Act</em> is the third part that concentrates on stories
from the ground. While it is important to conceptually engage with digital
natives, it is also, necessary to connect it with the real life practices that
are reshaping the world. Case-studies, reflections and experiences of people
engaged in processes of change, provide a rich empirical data set which is
further analysed to look at what it means to be a digital native in emerging
information and technology contexts.</p>
<strong>
</strong>
<p><strong>Book 4: To Connect : Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/dnbook4/at_download/file" class="external-link">here</a></strong></p>
<p>The last
section, <em>To Connect</em>, recognises the
fact that digital natives do not operate in vacuum. It might be valuable to
maintain the distinction between digital natives and immigrants, but this
distinction does not mean that there are no relationships between them as
actors of change. The section focuses on the digital native ecosystem to look
at the complex assemblage of relationships that support and are amplified by
these new processes of technologised change.</p>
<p>We see this
book as entering into a dialogue with the growing discourse and practice in the
field of youth, technology and change. The ambition is to look at the digital
(alter)natives as located in the Global South and the potentials for social
change and political participation that is embedded in their interactions
through and with digital and internet technologies. We hope that the book
furthers the idea of a context-based digital native identity and practice,
which challenges the otherwise universalist understanding that seems to be the
popular operative right now. We see this as the beginning of a knowledge
inquiry, rather than an end, and hope that the contributions in the book will
incite new discussions, invoke cross-sectorial and disciplinary debates, and
consolidate knowledges about digital (alter)natives and how they work in the
present to change our futures<strong>.</strong></p>
<p><strong><a class="external-link" href="https://www.surveymonkey.com/MyAccount_Login.aspx">Click here</a> to order your copy. We invite readers to contribute reviews of an essay they found particularly interesting. Contact us: nishant@cis-india.org and fjansen@hivos.nl if you want more information, resources, or dialogues</strong></p>
<p>Nishant
Shah</p>
<p>Fieke
Jansen</p>
<p><strong>For media coverage and book reviews,</strong> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/media-coverage" class="external-link">read here</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook</a>
</p>
No publishernishantSocial mediaDigital ActivismRAW PublicationsCampaignDigital NativesAgencyBlank Noise ProjectFeaturedCyberculturesFacebookPublicationsBeyond the DigitalDigital subjectivitiesBooksResearchers at Work2015-04-10T09:22:29ZBlog EntryDigital AlterNatives book launch
http://editors.cis-india.org/events/book-launch
<b>On Friday the 16th of September Hivos will launch the Digital AlterNatives with a cause? book, which looks at the dynamics of a new generation that is growing up with digital technology. In 2011 the digital native generation has been all over the front pages of the major newspapers in the world. CNN, BBC, de Volkskrant and the NRC gave prominent coverage on the ‘digital’ revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa and dubbed them as ‘Facebook’ and ‘Twitter’ revolutions. However, the recent events in the Middle East and North Africa, Spain, Greece, Israel, India, Chile and England show that there is more to this generation then just a nice tool. By framing it as Facebook actions we are simplifying the complex processes that are taking place and denying and underestimate the challenges and dynamics of this younger generation.</b>
<p>In this last year Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India have tried to shed some light on the actions, identities, networks and implications of the digital natives generation. We started by asking the basic questions: Who are they? Do they have a cause? What is their role in social and political processes? This exploration has resulted in new insights, reflections, anecdotes, case studies and opinion pieces by digital natives, academics and policy makers around the world, which have been synthesized in the Digital AlterNatives with a cause? collection.</p>
<p>We would like to invite you to the Museum for Communication in the Hague for the book launch of the Digital AlterNatives with a cause? collection. Here we will share our insights into the dynamics of this younger generation. Then Rebecca MacKinnon and Maarten van den Berg will give their opinion on our work which will be followed by an open debate. Please join us for the book launch on the 16th of September from 17.00 till 18.00.</p>
<p>See the information on the Hivos website <a class="external-link" href="http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/The-Changing-Face-of-Citizen-Action/News/Digital-AlterNatives-book-launch">here</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/events/book-launch'>http://editors.cis-india.org/events/book-launch</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaEvent TypeDigital Natives2012-01-04T06:56:41ZEvent