Digital Natives Blog
Digital Natives Workshop in South Africa - Call for Participation
The African Commons Project, Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society have joined hands for organising the second international workshop "My Bubble, My Space, My Voice" in Johannesburg from 07 to 09 November 2010. Send in your applications now!
On Talking Back: A Report on the Taiwan Workshop
What does it mean to Talk Back? Who do we Talk Back against? Are we alone in our attempts or a part of a larger community? How do we use digital technologies to find other peers and stake-holders? What is the language and vocabulary we use to successfully articulate our problems? How do we negotiate with structures of power to fight for our rights? These were the kind of questions that the Talking Back workshop held in the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica in Taiwan from 16 to 18 August 2010 posed.
Political is as Political does
The Talking Back workshop has been an extraordinary experience for me. The questions that I posed for others attending the workshop have hounded me as they went through the course of discussion, analysis and dissection. Strange nuances have emerged, certain presumptions have been questioned, new legacies have been discovered, novel ideas are still playing ping-pong in my mind, and a strange restless excitement – the kind that keeps me awake till dawning morn – has taken over me, as I try and figure out the wherefore and howfore of things. I began the research project on Digital Natives in a condition of not knowing, almost two years ago. Since then, I have taken many detours, rambled on strange paths, discovered unknown territories and reached a mile-stone where I still don’t know, but don’t know what I don’t know, and that is a good beginning.
Digital Natives : Talking Back
One of the most significant transitions in the landscape of social and political movements, is how younger users of technology, in their interaction with new and innovative technologised platforms have taken up responsibility to respond to crises in their local and immediate environments, relying upon their digital networks, virtual communities and platforms. In the last decade or so, the digital natives, in universities as well as in work spaces, as they experimented with the potentials of internet technologies, have launched successful socio-political campaigns which have worked unexpectedly and often without precedent, in the way they mobilised local contexts and global outreach to address issues of deep political and social concern. But what do we really know about this Digital Natives revolution?
Beyond the Digital: Understanding Digital Natives with a Cause
Digital natives with a cause: the future of activism or slacktivism? Maesy Angelina argues that the debate is premature given the obscured understanding on youth digital activism and contends that an effort to understand this from the contextualized perspectives of the digital natives themselves is a crucial first step to make. This is the first out of a series of posts on her journey to explore new insights to understand youth digital activism through a research with The Blank Noise Project under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge Programme.
Digital Natives Workshop in Taipei: Only a Few Seats Left!!!
The Centre for Internet and Society in collaboration with the Frontier Foundation is holding a three day Digital Natives workshop in Taipei from 16 to 18 August, 2010. The three day workshop will serve as an ideal platform for the young users of technology to share their knowledge and experience of the digital and Internet world and help them learn from each other’s individual experiences.
The power of the next click...
P2P cameras and microphones hooked up to form a network of people who don't know each other, and probably don't care; a series of people in different states of undress, peering at the each other, hands poised on the 'Next' button to search for something more. Chatroulette, the next big fad on the internet, is here in a grand way, making vouyers out of us all. This post examines the aesthetics, politics and potentials of this wonderful platform beyond the surface hype of penises and pornography that surrounds this platform.
Survey : Digital Natives with a cause?
This survey seeks to consolidate information about how young people who have grown up with networked technologies use and experience online platforms and tools. It is also one of the first steps we have taken to interact with Digital Natives from around the world — especially in emerging information societies — to learn, understand and explore the possibilities of change via technology that lie before the Digital Natives. The findings from the survey will be presented at a multi-stakeholder conference later this year in The Netherlands.
Digital Natives at Republica 2010
Nishant Shah from the Centre for Internet and Society, made a presentation at the Re:Publica 2010, in Berlin, about its collaborative project (with Hivos, Netherlands) "Digital Natives with a Cause?" The video for the presentation, along with an extensive abstract is now available here.
Colour Me Political
What are the tools that Digital Natives use to mobilise groups towards a particular cause? How do they engage with crises in their immediate environments? Are they using their popular social networking sites and web 2.0 applications for merely entertainment? Or are these tools actually helping them to re-articulate the realm of the political? Nishant Shah looks at the recent Facebook Colour Meme to see how new forms of political participation and engagement are being initiated by young people across the world.
Meet the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine
Digital Natives live their lives differently. But sometimes, they also die their lives differently! What happens when we die online? Can the digital avatar die? What is digital life? The Web 2.0 Suicide machine that has now popularly been called the 'anti-social-networking' application brings some of these questions to the fore. As a part of the Hivos-CIS "Digital Natives with a Cause?" research programme, Nishant Shah writes about how Life on the Screen is much more than just a series of games.
Fill The Gap: Global Discussion on Digital Natives
More often than not people don't understand the new practices inspired by Internet and digital technologies. As such a series of accusations have been leveled against the Digital Natives. Educators, policy makers, scholars, and parents have all raised their worries without hearing out from the people they are concerned about. Hivos has initiated an online global discussion about Digital Natives. So, to voice your opinion, start tweeting with us now #DigitalNatives.
Digital Natives with a Cause?
Digital Natives With A Cause? - a product of the Hivos-CIS collaboration charts the scholarship and practice of youth and technology with a specific attention for developing countries to create a framework that consolidates existing paradigms and informs further research and intervention within diverse contexts and cultures.
China's Generation Y : Youth and Technology in Shanghai
Within the context of internet technologies in China, Nishant Shah, drawing from his seven month research in Shanghai, looks at the first embodiment of these technologies in the urbanising city. In this post, he gives a brief overview of the public and academic discourse around youth-technology usage of China's Generation Y digital natives. He draws the techno-narratives of euphoria and despair to show how technology studies has reduced technology to tools and usage and hence even the proponents of internet technologies, often do a disservice to the technology itself. He poses questions about the politics, mechanics and aesthetics of technology and offers the premise upon which structures of reading resistance can be built. The post ends with a preview of the three stories that are to appear next in the series, to see how youth engagement and cultural production can be read as having the potentials for social transformation and political participation for the Digital Natives in China.
IT and the cITy
Nishant Shah tells ten stories of relationship between Internet Technologies and the City, drawing from his experiences of seven months in Shanghai. In this introduction to the city, he charts out first experiences of the physical spaces of Shanghai and how they reflect the IT ambitions and imaginations of the city. He takes us through the dizzying spaces of Shanghai to see how the architecture and the buildings of the city do not only house the ICT infrastructure but also embody it in their unfolding. In drawing the seductive nature of embodied technology in the physical experience of Shanghai, he also points out why certain questions about the rise of internet technologies and the reconfiguration of the Shanghai-Pudong area have never been asked. In this first post, he explains his methdologies that inform the framework which will produce the ten stories of technology and Shanghai, and how this new IT City, delivers its promise of invisibility.
i4D Interview: Social Networking and Internet Access
Nishant Shah, the Director for Research at CIS, was recently interviewed in i4D in a special section looking at Social Networking and Governance, as a lead up to the Internet Governance Forum in December, in the city of Hyderabad.
Storytelling and Technology - Sartaj Anand
This post outlines the general characteristics of storytelling. The second section is an interview with Sartaj Anand, the founder of EgoMonk and BIllion Strong, who talks about storytelling as a strategy to build trust at the intersections of business and technology. This is the first of a series of installments exploring the potential of storytelling for social change.
