Digital Natives Main

Information Design - Visualizing Action (TTC)

denisse — 2015-04-17T10:34:22Z

This is the second part of the Making Change analysis on information activism. It explores the role of the presentation and design of information to translate information into action.

CHANGE-MAKER: Maya Ganesh

PROJECT: 
Visualizing Information for Advocacy

METHOD OF CHANGE:
Redesign the production, presentation and representation of data to stimulate citizen action.

STRATEGY OF CHANGE: 
- Demystify the technology, strategy and tactics behind information design
- Train people on how to use them for their projects.
- Empower people and increase political participation at the grassroots

Part 2: Information Design

Tactical Technology aims to demystify strategies that stimulate citizen participation through the production, presentation and representation of data. Their 2010 program: Visualizing Information for Advocacy focuses on finding "the right combination of information, design, technology and networks" (2010) to communicate issues and stimulate action. As explored in the last post, campaigns must not only inform citizens, but must persuade them into acting. The way information is presented: the symbols, shapes and sequences plays a big part in creating deeper connections between the consumer and information. Using more visual advocacy examples, I will list three elements that underpin this connection: symbols, design and consumption culture.

I. Symbols

Marks or characters representing an object, function or abstract process

Lance Bennett’s work on civic engagement (2008), identified two features in information that motivate citizens to act:

a) Familiar values and activities
b) Action options that facilitate decision-making and the participation process

By personalizing data and finding symbols that embody these values and action options, the citizen is more likely to engage with the information. Throughout this post we will look at some examples, outside of Tactical Tech, that are applying these principles.

Example 1:
Dislike Poverty Campaign-  Un Techo para mi Pais (TECHO) Latin America

First example is this is the campaign by the Chilean NGO Un Techo para mi Pais. The organization’s main objectives are to a) to eradicate poverty and b) build a strong body of volunteers that epitomize a new way of understanding citizenship in the region. They are very popular among youth, in part due to their communication strategies and their use of social media. Recently, the ‘No Me Gusta’ (Dislike) campaign was featured in Spanish graphic design activism blog: Grafous, and the non-profit marketing website Osocio for its creative use of 'slacktivism' to mirror the young citizen's attitude towards poverty.

Slacktivism: "actions performed via the Internet in support of a political or social cause but regarded as requiring little time or involvement, e.g. liking or joining a campaign group on a social networking website"

No Me Gusta campaign, Un Techo para mi Pais. Photo courtesy of Grafous: http://www.grafous.com/no-me-gusta/.

The images juxtapose pictures of slums and an adaptation of the Facebook Like button - a familiar symbol of affirmation and approval among youth- into a Dislike button: enabling expression of discontent. This is coupled with the phrase: “if you dislike this, you can help by logging onto (...)”, channeling this disapproval into a plan of action. The campaign shows a thorough understanding of its target audience: including the visual culture of social media users, their digital habits and their satisfaction driven behavior (embodied by the like button). It ridicules the user by facing him with two realities: the ineludible situation of poverty versus his redeemable slacktivist idleness. This strategy proved to be effective and attracted the attention of potential volunteers; asserting the middle class, tech-savvy identity of the TECHO volunteer throughout Latin America.

Nonviolent methods and
Civic Participation

Capture attention.

Increase visibility of activism.

Reduce the stake of participation
for citizens

Attracts 'risk-averse' citizens and
creates 'safety in numbers'.

Success of campaign is more likely
(if 3.5% of population participates)

The use of familiar symbols is one of the 198 strategies listed by Gene Sharp in Part Two of The Politics of Nonviolent Action (explored in a past post). In the same spirit, Tactical Technology’s project 10 tactics provides “original and artful” wide communication non-violent methods to capture attention and disseminate information. This includes slogans, caricatures, symbols, posters and media presence, which besides from grabbing attention also reduces the stake of participation for citizens. According to Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, these methods increase the visibility of activist efforts, because they create a sense of ‘safety in numbers” and hence draw the “risk-averse” into the movements. Furthermore, their study shows that if a campaign manages to capture the active and sustained participation of only 3.5% of the total population, it is likely to succeed (2008).

While this statistic shows that enhancing the visibility of social change campaigns is an extremely resource-efficient strategy, on the other hand, it confirms information is in the hands of a privileged minority. The information-poor activist is completely reliant on the values and symbols the middle class chooses to downstream, unless information is designed by grassroots organizations who can localize it -one of the main objectives of Tactical Technology. The flow of ideas and conversations among the middle class, though not inclusive, is already stimulating the spirit of information dissemination. However, representations of data are not enough to trigger cognitive associations between the citizen and the issues. We must also consider the design and aesthetic features of these representations and how they inspire civic engagement.

II. (Graphic) Design

Communication, stylizing and problem-solving through the use of type, space and image.

MG: Presentation continues to be a problem. We have focused a lot on this, but it continues to be an issue when people have and are using information. You can’t assume people will get it and you need to think about what kind of information you have and what kind of audiences you want to see it, etc.

Liz Mcquiston, author of the 1995 and the 2004 editions of Graphic Agitation explored how art and design brings political and social issues to the fore. She argues that the increasing ubiquity of digital technology since the 90s, plus a popular ‘do-it-yourself’ culture, is creating a new environment of political protest that empowers individuals to take ownership of the creation and consumption of information. This is in line with Richard Wurman’s argument on the rise of the prosumer: digital users who are not only consuming but are also producing an unprecedented amount of information, which states that larger volumes of information, coupled with the expressive potential of art and design, makes personalized relationships with data possible, having it cater to our interests, needs and contexts (2001).

Example 2:
Design for Protest by Hector Serrano (University Cardenal Herrera)

Information design is creating ready-made avenues for civic engagement by breaking data down and providing step by step guides for implementation. For instance, students from the University Cardenal Herrera in Spain collaborated together in the project: “Design for Protest”, led by Hector Serrano, graphic designer and activist. The concept was to design “effective and functional” tools of demonstration, rooted in the rising number of protests around the world during the economic crisis. The students created communication tools: from foldable banners to protest umbrellas that allow protesters in Spain (and around the world) to convey their messages in creative, quick and affordable ways. This is the perfect conflation between consuming information proposals and producing new information from the grassroots to intervene in the public space.

Paraguas (Umbrella). Photo courtesy and How-to: Design For Protest: Paraguas

Light Banner. Photo courtesy and How-to: Design For Protest: Light Banner

Pocket Protest. Photo courtesy and How-to: Design for Protest: Protesta de Bolsillo

The field of information design is creating ready-made avenues for civic engagement. It is breaking down data and providing step-by-step guides for implementation. Although the Design for Protest project is not creating a permanent source of information, it is providing feasible alternatives to display information both in short-lived protests as much as in long-term campaigns, facilitating action-taking and abiding to the second feature of Bennett's hypothesis: providing action options to aid decision-making. Ganesh commented how these tool kits are also a mean Tactical Tech uses to secure sustainability and continuity:

MG: We have many available resources: from tools and guides (mobile in a box, security in a box, etc.), to the website. It is very focused on the digital tools that support what you want to do with your campaigning. You have a plethora of websites telling you what tools to use but not how to use it or how to think about how you want to use them for campaigning. As a result you have campaigns that are not well thought or that don’t use the appropriate type of technology, or driven by the technology first than what they want to do. This is one of the ways in which it continues.

III. (Culture) Design

Localizing information design

The ‘prosumer’ model aligns with an active model of citizenship we describe in a previous post. It fits citizens who are active and willing to find resources, and create and disseminate information that resonates within their context. Yochai Benkler’s work on information production (2006) Also touches on how cultural production enhances democratic practices in network societies. He argues that creating cultural meaning of the world has two important effects:

a) Sustains values of individual freedom of expression.
b) Provides opportunities of participation and cultural reassertion.

Ganesh’s account of the experience of Tactical Technology in the Middle East also highlights how cultural remix is a form political and creative empowerment:

MG: It is interesting how the Arab version has evolved. We had support to extend Ten Tactics in the Arabic region, but we didn’t want to do translations and tell people what to do. We wanted to see how people are thinking about information activism in their region, what kind of products would be useful to them. We’ve already printed 2000 copies and we are left only with 140. It is really popular because people really want to do this. We’ve met with 5-7 groups in the Arab region we’ve known for a long time. We said: here’s money (originally meant for translations) take our resources, anything you’ve found that we’ve published and: customize it, remix it, break it up and put it back together again; turn it into a resource that you can feel you can use with your communities. Partnering up, you must keep in mind their mandates and their communities.

Localizing design and aesthetics is essential to keep the connections between data-citizen relevant. This is explored from the perspective of post-colonial computing by Irani et. al; a project that aims to understand how ‘good design’ must be consistent with cultural identities and the transformative nature of cultural formation between the context and the individual (2010).

Example 3:
Proudly African and Transgender by Gabrielle Le Roux (In collaboration with Amnesty International and IGLHRC)

An interesting example of this is the work done by Gabrielle Le Roux, in collaboration with African trans and intersex activists (IGLHRC). A showcase of portraits and uncovered narratives of transgendered Africans in East and Southern Africa: that reasserts interesex and transgender identity in a society were these issues remain taboo and hence under the radar.

These visuals were exhibited in Europe by Amnesty International, and showcased in the Black Looks community (who participated in Tactical Tech’s 2009 InfoCamp) as well as in the WITS Centre for Diversity Studies research on Politics of Engagement: an interactive collaboration on social change through art-activism and research.

Example 4:
Camp Acra et Adoquin Delmas 33 - Haiti

An example less inclined on aesthetics but focused on visual documentation is the Camp Acra et Adoquin Delmas 33 blog, from Haiti. A site in which Camp Acra members are documenting their settlement and growth after the 2010 earthquake through essential information and images, fostering community building and communal identity reassertion.

“visual representations of information gives context to numbers, uncovers relationships and engages the viewers in ways that raw information could never do”
David McCandless

As David McCandless,data journalist, information designer and author of The Visual Miscellaneum points out: “visual representations of information gives context to numbers, uncovers relationships and engages the viewers in ways that raw information could never do” (2009). Having these representations mingle with culturally specific undertones provides opportunities to create solidarity ties between the citizen and its culture, as well as the add of “individual glosses” through action, critical reflection and participation (Benkler, 2006). However is this need for an aesthetic approach to information and culture representation a result of our consumer behaviour? Is it problematic that activism is catering to a model of promotion and presentation of information to incite participation? The next section will look shortly at the consumption culture in information activism.

IV. Consumption (Culture)

Is information design catering to consumption habits instead of citizen needs?
As seen, information design is grounded on the premise that the representation of data must create deep connections with its audience in order to incite a reaction. However, is this the result of a culture of consumption? Let’s not forget the citizens targeted by visual campaigns are also consumers in constant interaction with the market. Kozinet’s study of virtual communities of consumption (1999), is in line with Wurman's description of the behavior of a prosumer:

Behaviour of consumer vs. information prosumer

Kozinet - Virtual communities of consumption	Wurman - The prosumer
Discerning consumer	Displays curiosity in information
Less accessible for one-to-one processes	Suspicion over information gate-keepers
Producers of large amounts of cultural information	“New-found hunger” to find information related to its interests

Moreover, the Kozinet suggests a few strategies of how to interact with the consumer that also fit the strategies presented by Bennett at the beginning of this analysis:

How to connect with the consumer vs. citizen

Kozinet - Virtual communities of consumption	Bennett - Features of information for civic engagement
Segmentation of consumers	Tailor information to values and activities familiar to the citizen
More interaction with consumer	Suggest action options to facilitate decision-making and participation
Create loyal networks of consumption

With this parallel in mind, we asked Ganesh the extent to which info-activism resembles market consumption models:

MG: You need to think strategically about how it’s going to get picked up, where you want to promote your information, how you want to publish, present it; and push it. The problem with NGO, activists and independent individuals is that they are not as empowered financially [...]. If you look at the corporate section, journalism, etc; you have huge institutions and a lot of more finances behind this stuff. NGOs have one shot to make it work. That’s when people like us come in, to demystify, give people training and create platforms.

Comparing activists with ‘virtual consumption communities’ questions the extent to which corporate and social impact models are feeding of each other to present information and succeed. A deeper analysis of this relationship falls out of the scope of this post, but it is worth mentioning when exploring activism in information network societies. As Ganesh clarified, info-activism is not related to marketing, but visualizing information in attractive and interesting ways is crucial not only to persuade, but to make activism accessible and enticing. Today, ten years after it was founded, Tactical Tech maintains a critical approach to their work. It is now moving on to a next stage, beyond the mere representation of data and paying closer attention to the type of information that enhances impact and influence of their tactics.

MG: We have definitely moved on thinking about interesting ways of looking at this. Our questions are more critical and political right now. The nature of platforms, the nature of information sharing, what is the true face of social media? There is so much information and data right now. Once information is out there how do you actually make it evidence for evidence-based advocacy. We are trying to play with that idea a little bit. It's not only about having impact but also influence.

Conclusion:

Part 1 and 2 of this analysis have explored the process of transforming data into civic action. In part 1 we re-visited the question of information communities. We found that diversity in political opinion democratizes the debate in the public space. Information strategies must focus on making information from the grassroots visible and strengthening offline networks that facilitate information dissemination. In part 2, we explored the strategies behind the presentation and representation of this information.

Three main findings came from this analysis:

a) Non-violent visual advocacy is more likely to reduce the stakes of participation for the common citizen making political engagement more likely.
b) The role of design for short or long-term advocacy is to simplifythe process of civic action, facilitate decision-making and makethese projects self-sustainable.
c) Our consumption habits in the market are shaping how we process and interact with information in the public space. The possibility of consumer behavior permeating modalities of activism reinforces the need to explore the most interesting strategies for information dissemination.

From the perspective of the Making Change project’ it is interesting to explore this method to social change as a breach from the ‘spectacle’ criticism outlined by Shah. He argues that in contemporary activism, only a limited production of images enter the network - images in many cases detached from the material realities and experiences that shape the change process in the first place. This tendency results in paraphernalia over the visual, disregarding the crises that led to the inception of protests. The findings from this analysis indicate that visual persuasion is essential to capture the attention of citizens, and hence, the need for a pinch of ‘spectacle’ in data presentation cannot be overlooked. The challenge info-activism now faces is making data’s dissemination self-sustainable in offline communities through the strategy and design of its campaigns.

Furthermore, the data, stories and narratives Tactical Tech is working to uncover can only be effectively transformed into action through a reconfiguration of the data-citizen relationship. Information strategies, besides from focusing on how to make data enticing, must also focus on the recognition of a status quo of idleness around how we consume, produce, question or interact with information. Tactical Tech has gone a far way at spearheading this line of thought and spreading graphic resistance through civil society, however this is not sufficient unless this recalibration occurs at the individual citizen level.

Sources:

Bennett, W. Lance. "Changing citizenship in the digital age." Civic life online: Learning how digital media can engage youth 1 (2008): 1-24.
Benkler, Yochai. The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. Yale University Press, 2006.
Bimber, Bruce, Andrew J. Flanagin, and Cynthia Stohl. "Reconceptualizing collective action in the contemporary media environment." Communication Theory 15, no. 4 (2005): 365-388.
Brundidge, J.S. & Rice, R.E. (2009). Political engagement online: Do the information rich get richer and the like-minded more similar? In Chadwick, A. and Howard, N.H. (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics (pp. 144-156). New York: Routledge
Kozinets, Robert V. "E-tribalized marketing?: The strategic implications of virtual communities of consumption." European Management Journal 17, no. 3 (1999): 252-264.
McCandless, David. The Visual Miscellaneum: A Colorful Guide to the World's Most Consequential Trivia. Collins Design, 2009.
Shah, Nishant “Whose Change is it Anyways? Hivos Knowledge Program. April 30, 2013.
Wurman, Richard Saul, Loring Leifer, David Sume, and Karen Whitehouse. Information anxiety 2. Vol. 6000. Indianapolis, IN: Que, 2001.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/tactical-technology-design-activism-1

Information Activism - Tactics for Empowerment (TTC)

Denisse Albornoz — 2015-04-17T10:36:01Z

This is the first of a two-part analysis of information activism for the Making Change project. This post looks at the benefits and limitations of increasing access to information to enable citizenship and political participation.

CHANGE-MAKER: Maya Ganesh

PROJECT: 10 Tactics for Information Activism

METHOD OF CHANGE: 
Information activism at the intersection of data, design and technology

STRATEGY OF CHANGE:
-Demystify the technology, strategy and tactics behind information activism.
-Train people on how to use them for their projects.
-Empower people and increase political participation at the grassroots

I came into the office today and CIS Director gifted me the Red House edition of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: ‘We are All Born Free”. Skimming through it, I found a series of graphics and artistic interpretations of Articles 1 to 30:


							Article 5 Photo courtesy of Library Mice blog: http://bit.ly/1cAMpYy


							Article 24 Photo courtesy of Illustration Cupboard: http://bit.ly/1kI5EBd

The purpose of this book is to find “exciting ways to socialize young people to very real issues”, rewrite human rights in a “simple,accessible form” and stimulate imagination to “observe and absorb details in a way that words struggle to express”. While specifically targeted for 12+ children, these images create associations and connections that trump the dullness of black and white texts for any audience; offering an alternative way of presenting complex bodies of knowledge crucial for our survival, such as the Declaration of Human Rights.

Change: information interventions to inspire and facilitate change-making among civil society networks.

In the same spirit, Tactical Technology aims to use information design strategies to create similar associations in the field of activism. The Tactical Technology Collective is an organization dedicated to the intersections of data, design and technology in campaigning. Its has two main programs: Evidence & Action that works with data management in digital campaigning; and Privacy & Expression that provides digital security and privacysupport advice to activists. The collective envisions change as a creative and pragmatic intervention that inspires and facilitates change-making among civil society networks. We interviewed Maya Ganesh, who is part of the E&A program, and our conversation shed light on benefits and the challenges of using visual advocacy strategies to create social change.

On this opportunity, I will explore the potential of information activism to create opportunities and spaces of engagement. Following Saussure’s dyadic model of the sign, it will be split in two parts. The first entry will look at the ‘signified’: the ideas, associations and cultural conventions derived from information and how these could solve crises of civic engagement and citizen action. The second entry will look at the ‘signifier’ -the shapes and sequences that compose the knowledges navigating political activism. These will be viewed from the strategic, design and technological point of view. Both parts will be informed by our conversation with Maya and complemented by literature on political engagement in the digital age. On a less academic note, the posts will also refer to the experience of graphic designers, artists and bloggers who are experimenting with information design to express dissent in transnational platforms.

Part 1: Is Information Power?

‘Transforming Information into Action’ is Tactical Technology’s take on the traditional idiom ‘Knowledge is Power’. The collective’s experience shows there are a number of steps to transform raw data into political power and for the purpose of this analysis, I will only look at information disseminated with this particular intention. This will aid to understand the relationship between increasing information availability and having it trigger civic action in contemporary activism. According to Fowler and Biekart, acts of public disobedience and activism after 2010 share the objective of reclaiming active citizenship through ‘novel ways’ that counter traditional political participation mechanisms (2013). Hence, we want to know if information activism is one of these ‘novel’ strategies enabling citizenship in the digital era.

More power to whom?

Overcoming information inequity
If information activism is “the strategic and deliberate use of information within a campaign”, the first step is to question the type of information used in these campaigns. While many scholars claim that access to political opinion increases participation in the democratic process by fostering debate and inclusive deliberation on policy issues (Dahl, 1989, Bennett, 2003, 2008; Montgomery et al. 2004,) Brundidge and Rice’s exploration of Internet politics shows that strategies that merely increase access to information are flawed by design. They claim that increasing information mainly benefits the middle class, who counts with previous exposure to political knowledge and hence processes it with greater ease. This group ultimately dominates the public discourse widening -what they call- the ‘knowledge gap’ between socioeconomic classes (Brunridge and Rice, 2009, Bimber et al. 2005). This is the ‘information’ version of the gentrification of politics explored by Shah in the Whose Change is it Anyway thought piece, and a definite deterrent of collective action at the grassroots level.

A basic example to show how this manifests in the information environment is this info-graphic on Social Activism created by Column Five and Take Part and presenting the findings on their 2010 study on Social responsibility:

Example 1:
Social Activism Study (2010): How can brands engage Young Adults in Social Responsibility?

Access complete info-graphic here: http://www.2012socialactivism.com/images/infographic.png

The information is clear, the presentation is clean. This graphic could mobilize the middle class citizen who works in a company and has time and money to spare in donations and fund-raising activities. The graphic is informational yet it does not offer alternative participation avenues for groups outside of the politically savvy, young, educated and affluent circle (Brundidge and Rice, 2009) Instead, it reiterates socioeconomic inequalities from the offline community into the information landscape. With this in mind we asked Maya whether gentrification was a barrier for info-activism interventions at the grassroots:

MG: The things we are documenting are by citizens with socioeconomic barriers and obstacles. It is not our mandate to reach out to the ‘common citizen’ but it is very much our mandate to look at what is happening and what is happening to people with socioeconomic barriers who are lower on the ladder. If you look at Syrian info-activism, these are people facing the worst situations you can imagine, and they are doing it [...] and we document what they are doing, trying to understand it, pull out trends and then showing people.

Empowering information communities

Offline networks support information dissemination
In this respect, offline community networks are key to bridging the knowledge gap cited above. The relationship between organizations like Dawlaty, SMEX and Alt City and groups in the Arab region function as a core of ideas and resources from which localized methods and solutions emerge (read more here). This flow of information, coupled with the offline support, makes information from less visible demographics visible, deepens democracy and creates opportunities for these actors to participate and set the public agenda (2009). We asked Maya in what other ways information activism facilitates this process:

MG: We have moved on a lot from information activism. 10 Tactics is quite old for us now but it is still interesting to see how this stuff works. This material was produced in 2008-9 and is very popular with our audience. A lot of our work now is [...] take this material to newer communities of activists or people who have been around for a long time but are getting involved with the digital for the first time. That’s one part of our work and it’s sort of self-sustainable that way.

Therefore the value of information activism, rather than increasing the quantity of available data, is how it enables diversity and visibility of political opinion in the public sphere. One of the better known examples of information design interventions that gloat inclusiveness is:

Example 2
Occupy Design: the collective that builds “visual design for the 99%”:

2011

2011
Images courtesy of Experimenta Magazine: http://bit.ly/1hGpvOP

By presenting income and unemployment statistics about the American middle and lower class in the public space, activists from Occupy Design made the claims of the Occupy Wall Street Movement visual and visible. This enabled this group, the 99%, to reclaim the space not only through physical mobilization but also through the expression of subjectivities and open -graphic- power contestation. According to Pleyers, the pervasiveness of the movement both at the offline, online -and in this case, visual- levels created opportunities of horizontal participation, asserting spaces of democratic experience (2012).

From Information to Action

Is information enough?
Nevertheless, exposure to powerful images does not necessarily guarantee impact and influence, much less civic engagement. We asked Maya what she thought motivated civic action:

MG: External things push you over the edge. A flash-point issue could tip you over to do something different, even if you are that someone that has never been involved in anything. The gang rape in Delhi for example: it has sparked a lot of people who have never been involved and are now pushed to [act]. There are different precipitating factors and that’s why the stories of people: what people do, how they do it and why they do it, matters.

Women protesting in Bangalore after the Delhi gang rape. Photo courtesy of Dawn: http://bit.ly/1cAFLRP

Whether it is ‘external things’, a ‘flash-point issue’ or ‘precipitating factors’; the individual must make a connection between new events and how they affect the current status quo. A set of critical skills must be in place, as well as a desire to participate in civic life. (Brundidge and Rice 2009, as well as Montgomery et al. 2004) Richard Wurman, the american graphic designer, refers to this in his book ‘Information Anxiety’. He posits that there is an ‘ever-widening gap’; a ‘black hole’ between data and knowledge that limits our ability to make sense of information; even if it is vital for our context and survival. “The opportunity is that there is so much information; the catastrophe is that 99 percent of it isn’t meaningful or understandable” (Wurman et. al 2001) How do we reconcile this challenge with Tactical Technology’s mandate? What is the turning point between exposure to information and engagement in civic action?

In this post two issues behind information dissemination have been explored:

The risk of creating homogeneous political discussions by catering only to middle class’ interests; overlooking diversity of political expression in the public discourse.
The need for offline communities to facilitate information dissemination on the ground and mainstream the technical and financial support offered by collectives such as Tactical Technology.

The next question is how info-activism creates the connections between data and information to trigger civic engagement, and on this note, we proceed to analyse the role of the ‘signifier’ in information dissemination on the next post. Part two post will look at the strategy, design and technology behind the symbols and sequences of information, and how these determine the citizen’s perception of its ability to create change.

Access Part 2: Information Design, following this link:

Sources:

Biekart, Kees, and Alan Fowler. "Transforming Activisms 2010+: Exploring Ways and Waves." Development and Change 44, no. 3 (2013): 527-546.
Brundidge, J.S. & Rice, R.E. (2009). Political engagement online: Do the information rich get richer and the like-minded more similar? In Chadwick, A. and Howard, N.H. (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics (pp. 144-156). New York: Routledge
Bennett, Winston. "Communicating global activism." Information, Communication & Society 6, no. 2 (2003): 143-168.
Bennett, W. Lance. "Changing citizenship in the digital age." Civic life online: Learning how digital media can engage youth 1 (2008): 1-24.
Dahl, Robert A. Democracy and its Critics. Yale University Press, 1989.
Kathryn Montgomery et al., Youth as E-Citizens: Engaging the Digital Generation. Center for Social Media, 2004. Retrieved February 15, 20
Pleyers, Geoffrey. "Beyond Occupy: Progressive Activists in Europe." Open Democracy: free thinking for the world 2012 (2012): 5pages-8.
Shah, Nishant “Whose Change is it Anyways? Hivos Knowledge Program. April 30, 2013.
Wurman, Richard Saul, Loring Leifer, David Sume, and Karen Whitehouse. Information anxiety 2. Vol. 6000. Indianapolis, IN: Que, 2001.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/tactical-technology-information-is-power

Digital Native

nishant — 2015-04-17T10:40:02Z

The end of the year is supposed to be a happy, feel-good space for families, friends, societies and communities to come together and count our blessings. It is the time to look at things that have gone by and look forward to what the New Year will bring.

The article was originally published in the Indian Express on December 22, 2013.

And yet, when I started writing this piece, my horizons seemed to be eclipsed by the amount of violence we have witnessed in the last year, and the inability of our governance systems to deal with them.

Around this time last year, the nation had woken up to the horrors a young woman suffered as a group of men raped her in a moving bus in Delhi. The inhumanity of the crime, her tragic death, and the fact that despite our collective anger and grief, the year has been dotted with violence of a gendered and sexual nature, should be enough to quell any celebrations. What happened to her and then to many other reported and invisible survivors of sexual violence in the country has seen a dramatic transformation of the digital public sphere.

Spurred by anger, frustration and the realisation that we are often the agents of change, people have taken to the streets and the information highway in unprecedented forms. Every reported incident of sexual violence — from the young intern who was molested by a former Supreme Court judge to the now infamous Tehelka case — sparked great ire on Twitter, Facebook, blogs and collaborative user-generated content sites. Hashtags have trended, videos have gone viral. Men and women have bonded together to speak against the increasingly unsafe spaces we seem to inhabit.

Responding to this public demonstration and outrage, we have seen some positive developments from the governments and judiciary systems which are morally, legally and constitutionally bound to look after us. And yet, we are quickly realising that much of this is not enough. While the law takes its course and tries to craft and enforce more efficient regulation to prevent and protect victims of such violent crimes, we have despaired at how it doesn't seem to change things materially.

The digital spaces that we have used to fight, to protest and to call for action, are also where we have shared the frustration at how little material reality has changed. Hashtags on Twitter have gone through life cycles of anger, protest and despair, as the complex structures of archaic laws, slow judiciary processes, prejudiced judges, and a populist politics which is often superficial, take their toll on processes to establish justice, equality and freedom for our societies.

As tweets and Facebook updates have now clearly told us, through testimonies and witness accounts, these questions cannot be understood in isolation. The social media has consistently reminded us that the December 16 gang rape was not just about one woman. It was about the misogynist societies that we are constructing and the fundamental flaws in systems which encourage the idea that men have ownership of the bodies and lives of women in our country. Across the year, through campaigns by online intervention groups like the Blank Noise Project or through note-card viral memes like "I need feminism" have emphasised the need to acknowledge these not as "women's problems" or "exceptional" problems. These are problems that need to be understood in the larger context of human rights, and our rights to life, dignity, equality and freedom enshrined in our Constitution.

And yet, as another year comes to an end, the social media is ablaze at a decision that has marked one of the darkest days in recent judicial history. On December 11, the Supreme Court of India repealed the landmark historical judgement issued by the Delhi High Court that read down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that criminalises same-sex relationships. Finding this in defiance of our constitutional rights, the well-weighed judgment was celebrated across social media — nationally and globally — for its recognition that the problem of discrimination is never just about one demography or section of the society. As the LGBTQ communities stood in shock, there was something else that happened on social media.

For once, the comments of disbelief, anger and surprise turned into a roar for correcting such a verdict. And it is not only the LGBTQ identified people and activists who are joining this clamour. Straight people, people with families, families with LGBTQ children, are all coming out and finding a common bond of solidarity that works around hashtags and viral sharing of messages. The world of social media has shown how we have learned, that we cannot leave the underprivileged to fight for themselves. Because, if we ignore the discrimination against them, we will have nobody to support us when we are being treated as sub-human and irrelevant in a country that has often done poetic interpretations of what constitutional rights mean.

I started writing this piece with despair. But I slowly realise that maybe there is something to be thankful about this year. That even when our archaic systems of justice are catching up with the accelerated transformations in our lives, the social media does act as a public space where those bound together in their belief for equality and justice can act in solidarity. On Twitter, this fateful day, everybody was queer. And they did not have to identify themselves as men or women, straight, gay or lesbian. Despite our bodies, our differences, our status and practices, we can claim to fight for those whose voices, bodies, lives and loves are being negated in our country. And if you cannot take to the streets to make your support felt, remember that the digital public sphere is active and buzzing. Those in power have no choice but to take into account the collective voice on the internet, which demands and shall build open, fair and equal societies.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/indian-express-december-22-2013-nishant-shah-digital-native

Methods for Social Change

denisse — 2015-04-17T10:42:11Z

On this brief introduction, I outline the main targets of my research project for CIS and the HIVOS Knowledge Program. As a response to the thought piece ‘Whose Change is it Anyway’ I will explore civic engagement among middle class youth over the course of the next 9 months by interviewing change makers and collectives that are part of multi-stakeholder projects in Bangalore.

Why look at the civic engagement of digital natives?

Some of the main knowledge gaps in the literature revolve around understanding the type and extent of political motivation and engagement of citizens (Fowler and Biekart, 2011) and how these motivations translate into sustainable and meaningful participation (Cornwall and Coelho, 2007) in the public space. Having the digital platforms as a space of participation, expression and experience (Cornwall and Coelho 2007, Pleyers, 2012) is necessary but insufficient infrastructure for civic engagement. It is the equivalent of building highways to improve the mobility and communication transactions of a community, disregarding the extent to which it connects the interests, knowledges and identities of those who transit these roads. Through the ‘Methods for Social Change’ project I want to explore the different factors behind building a strong sense of citizenship and sustained civic engagement through technology-mediated change practices.

The project seeks to respond to the questions around change-making raised in the thought piece 'Whose Change is it Anyway?', as part of the Making Change project. One of the main challenges today is how to move beyond the ‘spectacle’ created around digitally mediated change. The third axis of the piece specifically refers to what Shah calls the ‘spectacle imperative’, and suggests us to take a look at the less visible, undocumented narratives that are currently shaping change. Maro Pantazidou also makes the distinction between mass events and every-day practices of change; an interesting complement to Shah’s critique. Both frame ‘spectacle’ events that signal change in the public space as frequently short-lived instances of change, that lack a strong foundation to carry the “revolution” forward through every-day behaviour and practices.

This is not to say I am discrediting the impact of visibility of mass event citizen action. Change must be tackled from different fronts; whether it is by occupying the social imaginary through highly visible displays of civil disobedience or by tackling smaller community battles. However, according to John Gaventa and Gregory Barrett and their findings on mapping the outcomes of citizen engagement, there must be two elements to sustain activism culture: a) the presence of informed active citizens in the movement and b) practicing prefigurative activism, which is establishing horizontal democratic values in the internal organization of this movement. In other words, one of the ways to move beyond the ‘spectacle’ paradigm in citizen action, is through embedding civicness and solidarity networks in its citizens. Hence, my research will be based on the hypothesis that in order to make a transition from spectacle to quotidian activism, change practices must be infused with citizenship-building methods and the negotiation of the citizen identity in public and private spaces.

Who, Where and How

From this proposition, there are three areas to be explored:

First, the profile of our change agents. The population interacting with political and social issues through digital technologies is a very specific and privileged demographic. This group, assuming motivation and disposition, must count with the corresponding access and resources to act. As brought up in the Mapping Digital Media: India Report, recently published by the Open Society Foundation, middle class activism is not only on the rise but is currently experiencing the highest visibility when compared to political and social activism. This is the case not only for India but also for emerging economies in the Global South where the internet penetration rate is very much related to socio-economic status as well as to the urban-rural divide. Shah refers to this as the gentrification of contemporary politics and it is one of the core poignant critiques of his piece.

However, it also leads to the question of how to channel the resources and privileged accessibility of this group for the 'greater good'. Instead of focusing on the problematic behind this power inequality, I would like to look at how this group is using these resources to create partnerships that allows them to disseminate knowledge, awareness and confidence to other citizens; the formula behind strong citizenship and willingness to act according to Gaventa. This underscores the need for a mapping exercise that looks at the Indian political and social context in Bangalore and India, and identify the main challenges and opportunities to build citizenship and engagement among the middle class.

Second, the spaces where responsible citizenry must be instilled. As mentioned above, one of the main questions is how to translate the horizontal values of pre-figurative activism proposed by Gaventa into the horizontal forms of organization at the community level proposed by Pantazidou. The latter claims that establishing solidarity networks fights citizen alienation by providing a sense of belonging and adds that in order to strengthen these communal relations, citizens must be fully active, present and available in the social arena. In this respect, the possibilities for collaboration through online tools are grand for activism. Online tools and net-ability as pointed out by Fowler and Biekart in their exploration of post-2010 trends in activism, increase connected solidarity and collective consciousness, which are paramount for engaging the populace with its civic duties both in the community as in the larger public space.

Nevertheless, digital tools remain neutral in the question of how to translate it into sustainable every-day practices for change. In order for online engagement to be truly sustained it must be backed up by a solid offline community that carries this lifestyle forward; a question at the backbone of this research. I will be looking at individuals and collectives from different fields that build partnerships to create positive and sustainable change in Bangalore and India. The objective is to see how further collaboration between change agents translates to the ground level by bringing new groups of people, with different skill sets, lenses and networks into the field of social change. Another interesting possibility is exploring whether these new amalgams of change practices prove to be more enticing and provoking for the 21st century citizen.

Along these lines, the methods utilized to engage this group will be the third area of research. Although the prevalence of the ‘spectacle’ blurs the lines between engaging in meaningful civicness and succumbing into the fad of ready-made activism, it would be interesting to look at what makes the ‘spectacle’ appealing and borrow some of those elements to improve advocacy practices. As outlined in the piece, events of change now seem to demand three characteristics to be effective: legibility, intelligibility and accessibility. Creating an image following these criteria provides the message a degree of visibility and clarity that enables its recognition and further amplification through digital technologies.

Therefore, the final research goal is to explore multi-stakeholderism and its potential to enhance visibility for social change. Identify artists, graphic designers, start-ups, entrepreneurs and collectives who are remixing their skills with technology to revisit the question of impact and influence on their audience. I would like to test whether Pleyers’ thesis on the cross-fertilization of activisms also applies to strategie and analyse whether this approach helps overcome the limitations of each tactic, foster ownership by different stakeholders and ultimately empower citizens. Furthermore, as part of a generation that is highly stimulated by the 'visual', I am curious to see how the role of aesthetics and inter-disciplinary collaboration behind middle class activism unfolds. Particularly in Bangalore, a crossroads of technology, activism and creativity, innovation is becoming a praxis norm among change makers. What is left to explore is the extent to which this creative ecosystem can produce and attract the apathetic citizen into the camp of sustainable civic action.

All interviews and change-makers profiles will be published regularly on the Making Change page on the CIS Website.

Sources

Biekart, Kees, and Alan Fowler. "Transforming Activisms 2010+: Exploring Ways and Waves." Development and Change 44, no. 3 (2013): 527-546
Cornwall, Andrea, and Vera Schatten Coelho, eds. Spaces for change?: the politics of citizen participation in new democratic arenas. Vol. 4. Zed Books, 2007.
Gaventa, John, and Gregory Barrett. "So what difference does it make? Mapping the outcomes of citizen engagement." IDS Working Papers 2010, no. 347 (2010): 01-72.
Open Society Foundations “Mapping Digital Media: India, 2012. Retrieved from: http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/mapping-digital-media-india-20130326.pdf
Shah, Nishant “Whose Change is it Anyways? Hivos Knowledge Program. April 30, 2013.
Pantazidou, Maro. "Treading New Ground: A Changing Moment for Citizen Action in Greece.
Pleyers, Geoffrey. "Beyond Occupy: Progressive Activists in Europe." Open Democracy: free thinking for the world 2012 (2012): 5pages-8.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/methods-for-social-change

Public Art, Technology and Citizenship - Blank Noise Project

denisse — 2015-04-17T10:43:55Z

Jasmeen Patheja speaks about the active citizen in the digital age, its challenges in the public and private spheres and interdisciplinary methods to overcome them.


CHANGE-MAKER: Jasmeen Patheja

PROJECT: Blank Noise Project: A volunteer-led arts collective community

STRATEGY OF CHANGE:
 Fostering an active, participatory and horizontal model of citizenship,
 empowering its volunteers to participate politically and address issues
 of street sexual harassments in the public sphere.

METHOD OF CHANGE: Public space interventions using community art and technology.

To open the interview series for the Making Change project, I interviewed Jasmeen Patheja. She is the founder of Blank Noise, a volunteer-led arts collective community that started in Bangalore and has now spread to Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Calcutta, Chandigarh, Hyderabad, and Lucknow. It seeks to address street sexual harassment and violence by triggering dialogue and building testimonials around notions of "teasing" and "harassment" in the public discourse. The collective has garnered attention and momentum since it was founded in 2003, and ever since, it’s fostering a model of active citizenship across India through its volunteer network. The story of Blank Noise and the working of community art with technology highlight the need to create spaces of expression and experience in which civic and political creativity can develop and unfold organically.

One of the main reflections stemming from my conversation with Jasmeen was the question of how technologies can create a sense of ownership and active citizenship. At the moment, we are moving on to a scenario in which technology has a more pervasive and complex presence. It is no longer judged merely on its connective utility, but is also understood as an actor, a space and a context within the ecosystem of social change and political democratic systems. For this reason, it is paramount to get to know the citizen that is being exposed to, influenced and impacted by these technologies and identify the ways in which his self-identity, social membership and political participation (King and Waldron 1988, Turner 1986, 1990) are being molded by them.

In this post, I aim to unpack ‘active citizenship’ drawing from political science literature around citizenship and civic engagement. The analysis will be based on two dichotomies proposed by Turner: the tension between the active-passive citizen, and the contradictions between its private and public presence. I will then refer to Westmeister and Kahnein, Kabeer, Gaventa and Bennett to identify the type of citizen that Jasmeen Patheja hopes to yield through her project and the main challenges of manoeuvering in the public space. Finally, I will look at some of the tactics taken by Blank Noise to reconcile these tensions through community art and technology. This exploration of citizenship is a first stage in the journey of detecting the undertones of citizen action for social change in the digital era.

Unpacking Citizenship

ACTIVE VS. PASSIVE CITIZEN

What is the difference between an active and a passive citizen?

A passive citizen comes to existence as a subject, recipient or client of the state (...) regards its rights as privileges handed down from above (...)complies with norms yet does not act to change circumstances (...)and its security and survival are merely determined by constitutional and common law traditions

Turner places the citizenship question on two points of contention. The first: the vectorial nature of citizenship and how to recognize an ‘active or passive’ citizen. According to his analysis, a citizen either comes to existence from above as mere subject of the state, or from below as an active bearer of its rights (Mann 1987, Ullmann 1975, Turner 1990). The force and direction from which the citizen emerges has important implications for the self-identity of the individual, its confidence and disposition for political participation (Merrifield, 2001). A passive citizen regards its rights as privileges handed down from above, in such a way that citizenship becomes a strategy for social integration and cooperation (Mann, 1986). Westheimer and Kahne find the manifestation of this model in what they call a “Personally Responsible Citizen”: a dutiful citizen who complies with norms, pays taxes and obeys laws, yet does not act to change the circumstances of other communities (2004). However, defining the citizen as a passive actor constraints its role within its network. If the citizen’ security and survival are merely determined by constitutional and common law traditions, and the negotiation between institutions and the individual (Weber 1958 - refer to Turner 1990), the individual is a disempowered recipient or client (Cornwall, 2007) as opposed to the proactive agent Blank Noise looks to recruit and shape through heir interventions.

Patheja, as shown by the interview, aims to disrupt the passive citizen model by fostering political participation and putting its counterpart: ’the active citizen’ forward. Blank Noise believes the citizen must ground its claims from the grassroots and grow from below; yet still be visible and present in the public space, redefining problematic concepts looming in society’s social imaginary; what Turner would describe as revolutionary citizenship (1990).

How is your practice building a stronger model of citizenship?
Change cannot happen only at one level. It would involve more people and different groups from different communities. For example, with citizen-led street action; we can’t end it there. It needs to push home the cause and make [the issues] visible with the government. How do we work with the government? Learning to ask and not assume it’s all their responsibility, but learning to assert our citizenship. What does it mean to do this? What does it mean to ask for safer cities in a way that it doesn’t become somebody else’s business entirely but that it’s about being able to see we are a society. We must understand the process of citizenship; what it means to be in a democratic country and what means to be a female citizen in it.

Safe City Pledge - Delhi

Safe City Pledge - Mumbai
Courtesy of Blank Noise blog: http://bit.do/fHMm

The message is: “this is your city, this is your space. Don’t be apologetic for your presence” And over time, Action Heros are reporting change: ”I'm getting my space. I'm not thinking twice about what I have to wear.” [...]So it was not only about a vocabulary shift, but a shift in attitude.

An active citizen comes from below as an active bearer of its rights (...), feels impelled to engage and mobilize its network (...) keeps government and community members in check (...) and evolves with a higher sense of individual purpose favoring solidarity and maintaining networks of community action.

Westheimer and Kahne label this stronger orientation towards a social-change approach as the second degree of civic engagement or as the behaviour of a ‘participatory citizen’; an individual who feels impelled to engage and mobilize its network, skills and action to respond to a community need. This participation impetus is one of Patheja’s main expectations from its Action Hero Network. However, this entails relying on intimate shifts of behaviour and attitude among the volunteers, which are in essence hard to demand, inculcate and entrench by a third party.

Their approach also reflects a vision of citizenship that relies on collective action (Montgomery, 2004) to, not only keep the government in check as suggested by Westheimer and Kahnne, but other community and society members as well. From Bennett’s point of view and taking the role of information technologies into account, he would define the ideal Action Hero as a self-actualizing citizen. In contrast to its counterpart: the dutiful citizen, who sees its obligation to participate in government-centered activities, the AC evolves with higher sense of individual purpose, favouring and maintaining networks of community action, backed up by a growing distrust in media and the government. In this sense the role of technology is also paramount to how Blank Noise spreads its predicament and expands its outreach:

What is the role of technology and media in your project?
Using the web for example, we happened to stumble upon blogging and we realized there was a community there. Once [Action Heroes] started blogging and the press started writing about it, it created a community further. So, going back to the fact that our constant thread of conversation has been the web, there is a large percentage of the English speaking youth who are action hero agents anidd now have the responsibility of taking the conversations and actions forward.

On the other hand, this is not always the case. In Delhi we did an event in collaboration with Action Aid. Many of the Action Aid volunteers weren’t necessarily on Facebook. They were people who were largely Hindi speaking; their stories were about harassment in slums and these were men and women wanting to do something about the issue. So being a loose volunteer is one way, but identifying different communities is also important. Every space is a point of engagement and we use different forms of media to enable that.

Citizen participation, communication and mobilization mechanisms, mediated by the state in the past, are now taken up by the people in the form of social protest, civil disobedience, digital activism, consumerism, etc. (Bennett, 2008). The emphasis on collective action also calls for a broader understanding of the citizen, away from the state-conferred rights and duties, and a definition that includes solidarity and membership to broader communities (Ellison 1997), Heater and Kabeer defines this as a “horizontal view” that stresses the relationship between citizens over that of the state and the individual (Heater 2002, Kabeer 2007) and Berlin has also made the connection between group identity and affiliation as a building block of citizenship (1969).

[on Giving Letters to Strangers] We trigger a conversation and it takes its own journey. Over time, what does it take to lean back and relax? Each person participates establishing their own level of comfort and every person’s narrative is different. [The project is] happening in Delhi while it is happening in Bangalore; allowing it to happen in a very individual, self-confrontational and at the same time, collective experience. They are doing this alone knowing that others are doing the same.

Dear Stranger:
Giving out letters to strangers in the streets of Bangalore. Courtesy of Blank Noise blog: http://bit.do/fHJw

In this way, Blank Noise has envisioned and designed a project that fosters an active, participatory, self-actualizing and horizontal model of citizenship. This combination builds a citizen prototype with a positive disposition and attitude to civic action; traits that Gaventa identifies as elements of empowerment and political agency that can derive into higher possibilities for social change. Having citizens identify community’s ailments as their own and their network’s responsibility, results in conversations that act as causal nexus of community action. The main challenge at the moment is the implementation of this model. To what extent will the Action Hero represent this model uniformly and steadily, preventing dissonance between Blank Noise’s discourse and its practice. And secondly, how will Blank Noise volunteers negotiate their political participation between public and private spaces?

PRIVATE VS. PUBLIC SPACE

Where should the active citizen operate?

The second tension on citizenship, as identified by Turner, is its political expression on the public arena versus its manifestation on the individual’s private space. We asked Jasmeen about the crises and spaces in which Blank Noise is operating:

To what crisis is the project responding to?
The project responds to the crises and experiences of street harassment. To the sense of getting defensive, agitated, angry; creating a wall and feeling vulnerable in a city. Blank Noise was initiated at a time were street harassment was disregarded and dismissed as teasing. This ‘eve-teasing’, just going by the pulse of things, included concepts of molestation and sexual violence. There was denial, there was silence.

First point on the public vs. private dilemma lies on the issue at hand. Volunteers are working to re-conceptualize social norms around ‘safety’, ‘agency’ and ‘gender’, that are not only deeply entrenched in society, but that can also be traced back to the private domain of traditions and culture at the household level. By openly discussing ‘sexual harassment’ in the public space and enabling volunteers to express and act on the basis of a new understanding of citizenship and freedom, the collective is possibly also redefining dynamics at the private space of its volunteers. What is more, the motivation and determination to be an Action Hero, as mentioned by Patheja, must be grounded in a "personal shift and challenge".

How does this translate it into citizens taking ownership of the cause and sustained behavioral change in everyday practices?
Anger is a good starting point. It is worrying when there is no anger. And then it has to be a personal shift. We’ve learned from conversations and feedback that volunteers who would say: “we came to address the issue and we are realizing that we are doing something in ourselves”. So what is the spirit of an Action Hero? Allowing something to shift and challenging something in yourself. Last year for example we worked towards having locality specific Action Hero networks and on how this intuitive citizen can become a full citizen, in terms of being an informed citizen as well.

Acton Hero Game. Courtesy of Blank Noise blog: http://bit.do/fHKq

The expectation of a personal pledge at the individual, community and public level, signals the project is blurring the lines between the private and public domain and fostering the politicization of the citizen at all fronts. This suggests that in order for the claims and behaviour of Action Heroes to become sustainable, they must also trickle into the common citizen’s routine. In words of Arendt: “the space of appearance comes into being whenever men are together in the manner of speech and action, predating all formal constitutions of the public realm” (1989). Establishing the private-public space as a common ground works towards bringing consistency and coherence to the interventions, yet it remains in many ways problematic and threatening to individual freedoms.

Does your project create new spaces for citizen expression and action?
Our role is to build testimonials and translate them back into the public domain. An example of this is the blogathon that happened in 2006, initiated by our Action Hero. She said: let’s invite bloggers to share their experiences of street harassment. 4-5 male and female Action Heroes made the event happen and in a couple of days we had hundreds and hundreds of testimonials and people talking about this for the first time. Maybe it was the first time speaking about it, remembering things that happened ages ago and that they had never shared. Suddenly the web was seen as a space where people could speak. Suddenly people had so much to say about the issue, the person dismissing the issue and their relationship with their body and the city.

Talk To Me:
Creating spaces for conversation and collaboration. Courtesy of Blank Noise blog: http://bit.do/fHKq

Turner reflects on the French revolution tradition to shed light on this particular challenge for active citizenship, as what bound Frenchmen together was their citizen identity (Baker 1987). Passing on from state subjects, to actively voicing their political, civic and social aspirations coupled with meaningful mechanisms of participation. However, how do we reconcile this tradition of positive democracy with the American understanding of citizenship that enshrines the autonomous sanctity of the private space. American individualism values personal success and the main way to exercise political participation is through voluntary associations that do not represent a large-scale force -or a threat- with enough power to shape their lives (Bellah et. al 2008, Turner 1990). Translating this to the Bangalorean context: a changing society in which community- based traditions in the household are coexisting with an agitated and growingly individualist youth culture; the issues and interventions must be addressed in an implicational manner. The connections between the issue and individual freedoms must be made, in order for these actors to be willing to politicize their action in both the public and private spheres.

MIDDLE CLASS ACTIVISM

Can everybody be an active citizen?

The second challenge is rooted in the socio-economic group that comprises the body of volunteers of Blank Noise. I asked Jasmeen the extent to which the Action Hero Network was being led by middle class citizens.

Are you only reaching out to the middle class activist that has the resources to be part of the Blank Noise project?
Yes and no. A large percentage of our volunteers are usually web-savvy, English speaking, teenagers or in their early 20s. Others have been around for the last decade. The mainstream media also reports back mainly to the web-savvy groups. But it is also about one action hero inspiring another Action Hero. I find [the project] fascinating in terms of the spaces it leaks into. Some people tell me they were at their religious meeting and they overheard two women talking about the project, who were not necessarily web-savvy. Ultimately the media is not only reporting us but we see them as point of engagement in which more and more citizens take ownership of the issue. Although our network is largely urban middle class, we are at the point where we collaborate largely with other groups that are working with different communities so it completes the entire picture. The question is: how do you take the conversation forward? What can be that medium? and what kind of technology can get to people?

“We use different strategies to enable dialogue across communities. It could be on the street, on the blog, within a workshop; the web has been a constant space. If you are an Action Hero, yes you may be web-savvy, but you also carry the responsibility to take the conversation to another space."

Jasmeen Patheja

This demographic is ultimately an interest group leading a movement and has taken on the responsibility of spreading the call to action among its network. Foregoing the assumption that every Indian citizen wants to challenge concepts of sexual harassment in the city, the fact that one group is spreading a specific opinion puts forward a tension between the dynamics of public social protest and the existence of privatized dissent. Turner reflects on Mill’s On Liberty and shows how this could entail a threat of spreading mass opinion to the extent it makes all people alike (Turner, 1990).

Kabeer also highlights this by exploring the tension between universality versus particularity — a debate that questions the extent to which human rights advocacy in the public sphere will be equally received and supported by every group, given diversity of opinion within as well as obstacles to freedom of speech. Nyamu-Musembi attempts to bridge this dichotomy by framing universality as “the experience of resistance to general oppression” and particularity as “how resistance speaks to each relevant social context”. In order to have the issue speak to all citizen groups, Blank Noise is currently also depending on the the ability of its Action Heroes to pass on a message that speaks to the different needs and cultural sensibilities of communities who do not belong to the Anglo-speaking middle class it is currently operating with.

In response to having the protest of a specific social group translate into homogenized dissent, Jasmeen is looking to increase her outreach by approaching and working with other groups.

How can you build effective solidarity networks among middle class activists, their networks and further communities?
It is an attitude we are trying to push forward: have that conversation with your grandma; with your domestic help. We would love to do something with domestic workers for example. We don’t hear enough stories of who empowers or harasses them. That’s definitely a rising concern within the collective. We really need to have the complete spectrum and what kind of technology or strategies can be used to get it. Identifying these groups is a proposed future project and also an ongoing preoccupation. For now, our role is to trigger conversations and have them take their own journey.

METHODS FOR CHANGE

How does the combination of art and technology foster active citizenship?

Some of the strategies Blank Noise has devised to overcome these obstacles relate back to the interdisciplinary design of its interventions. First, they are designed to be highly visible and aimed at triggering dialogue. This enables opinions and thoughts to flow from the private space into the public realm. Also, community art and technology as tools of expression and reflection, work as effective channels for responses to flow back and forth between both spaces.

Why did you take a multi-stakeholder approach and brought together technology and art?
The entire collective is really based on defining strategies and identifying approaches to breaking denial and building conversation. Our role is enabling dialogue across forms of media and using different strategies to enable dialogue across communities. There are also lots of questions of how to create an art practice that can be collaborative and participatory. Where does art exist? How can art exist, be, feel confrontational? Can arte provoke? How can we build testimonials? Could be on the street, on the blog, twitter or within a workshop. The web has been a constant space. We also work with the web in a way that we have a growing community of Action Heroes, and if you are web-savvy, you carry the responsibility to take the conversation to another space.

Twitter campaign. Courtesy of: http://bit.do/fHLK

Public art installation to redefine sexual harassment and eve-teasing. Courtesy of Caravan Magazine: http://bit.do/fHLV

Bennett and his work on civic engagement in the digital age, notes that one of the main strategies for positive civic engagement is nurturing creative and expressive actions in this generation.

How does this approach work towards creating sustainable change?
We are creating tool kits for different ideas so the community can take it forward. There are many creative processes that equip them to initiate action in a community space. For instance, the Yelahanka Action Heroes workshop (http://yelahankaactionheroes.wordpress.com/), was a one month initiative that got Sristhi students to arrive to action heroism through games, like the Hahaha Sangha for example. We invited women out of their homes, and we would speak through pure laughter, gibberish and a sense of play. In doing that, people felt they knew each other. Anonymity was broken, people felt comfortable and safety was established. We are working towards creating safe public spaces and going beyond the biases that come from language or through age. But through the Hahaha Sangha we found there is still a need for facilitators to continue the project with the purpose of creating a safe space. Also, one of our interns is in charge of creating an Action Hero College Network and spreading information about different events, calendars, etc. It is still fluid but we are moving in that direction. Action Heroes are the strength of the project.

Hahaha Sangha sessions - Courtesy of Blank Noise blog http://bit.do/fHMb

The ideal of an engaged youth must be sustained by the empowerment of young people; getting them to recognize their personal expression and identities in collective spaces (Bennett, 2008). By setting in place mechanisms and opportunities to critically dissect societal problems and develop a political perspective as put forward by Westheimer and Kahne, as well as the awareness, self-identity and political confidence to act, as noted by Gaventa, the Blank Noise interventions become a context in which active citizenship is more likely.

Conclusion

This analysis, part of the Methods of Social Change research project, aimed to shed light on how change-makers such as Blank Noise still place a heavy consideration on the notion of citizenship when designing, framing and implementing their projects. What is more, it is paramount to identify the working characteristics of an ‘active citizen’ and reflect on whether these are desirable and necessary in the populace to make political and social change more likely. It also contributes to the Making Change project by unpacking the workings of a change actor that is not confined to the ‘category of citizen’ but is still closely linked to processes of citizen action and social change in Bangalore.

As seen throughout this post, the analysis of our citizen is not grounded on its relationship with the state, but instead on its disposition, self-identity and notion of social membership. After identifying our ideal active citizen: an active bearer of his rights, that defines itself horizontally in relation to other citizens and their rights, participates in political processes and is informed about and at odds with power imbalances, the Blank Noise experience demonstrated spatial tensions in implementing this ideal and practice in the public and private realms. Designing strategies and identifying technologies that enable a flow of thought and action between both spaces is a way of restructuring the ecosystem in which volunteers from the Action Hero Network interact with each other, reclaim their citizenship and alter the status quo from within. While Blank Noise is not starting a revolution, it is consolidating a process of steady and growing resistance in the public and private discourse of sexual harassment and eve-teasing in the city.

Shah also notes there are implicit codes allowing only certain people to embrace this model of citizenship. This was evident on the demographic that comprises the activist bases of Blank Noise and the risks of homogenizing the political space with their discourse of change. Jasmeen Patheja brought this point forward herself, but with full confidence on the ability of dialogue and conversation to keep luring other social groups and communities into joining the debate. We discussed opportunities from exploring the foreign women experience in the public space in India to expanding the Blank Noise basis through simultaneous international interventions enabled and coordinated through technology. The network is ever-growing and its mechanisms of change are constantly innovating and adapting through its content. In the meantime, the ‘active citizen’ remains at the core of it all, pushing the project forward; fighting among other battles, that of its identity’s reassertion in the landscape of change.

Sources

Arendt, Hannah (1989) The Human Condition. Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Baker, Keith Michael. The French Revolution and the creation of modern political culture. Vol. 3. Pergamon Press, 1987.
Bennett, W. Lance. "Changing citizenship in the digital age." Civic life online: Learning how digital media can engage youth 1 (2008): 1-24.
Berlin, Isaiah. "Two concepts of liberty." Berlin, I (1969): 118-172.
Bellah, Robert Neelly, ed. Habits of the heart: individualism and commitment in American life: with a new preface. University of California Pr, 2008.
Cornwall, Andrea, and Vera Schatten Coelho, eds. Spaces for change?: the politics of citizen participation in new democratic arenas. Vol. 4. Zed Books, 2007.
Ellison, N. (1997) ‘Towards a new social politics: citizenship and reflexivity in late modernity’, Sociology, 31(4): 697–717.
Gaventa, John, and Rajesh Tandon “Citizen engagements in a globalizing world." Globalizing citizens: New dynamics of inclusion and exclusion (2010): 3-30.
Heater, D. (2002) World Citizenship: Cosmopolitan Thinking and Its Opponents, London: Continuum
Kabeer, Naila, ed. Inclusive citizenship: Meanings and expressions. Vol. 1. Zed Books, 2005.
Kathryn Montgomery et al., Youth as E-Citizens: Engaging the Digital Generation. Center for Social Media, 2004. Retrieved February 15, 2007. http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/ecitizens/project.htm.
Mann, Michael. "Ruling class strategies and citizenship". Sociology 21, no.3 (1987): 339-354
Shah, Nishant “Whose Change is it Anyways? Hivos Knowledge Program. April 30, 2013.
Turner, Bryan. Outline of a Theory of Citizenship. Sociology (May 1990), 24 (2), pg. 189-217
Westheimer, Joel, and Joseph Kahne. "What kind of citizen? The politics of educating for democracy." American educational research journal 41, no. 2 (2004): 237-269

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/blank-noise-citizenship

Digitally Enhanced Civil Resistance

denisse — 2015-04-17T10:46:50Z

This reflection looks at how civil disobedience unfolds in network societies. It explores the origins of nonviolence, describes digital and non-digital tactics of non-violent protest and participation and finally comments on the possibilities of this form of civil resistance to foster individual and collective civic engagement.

Reflections of the possibilities of non-violence flooded newspapers on October 2, commemorating Gandhi’s birthday and the long-lasting legacy of civil resistance and non-violence. Debashish Chatterjee reflected on India’s founding father as “the true source” of timeless principles on his column in the New Indian Express. He claimed that his unswerving commitment to the core purpose of truth and having non-violence as the main way to achieve his goals was the formula behind the success of his bloodless revolution for political independence. Rajni Bakshi questioned the power and relevance of non-violence in our times in his article for the Hindu. “Stating and repeatedly restating our intention in favour of non-violence is an essential starting point (…) so vital to our species’ present and future”. Courage and ‘the ability to strike’, states Bakshi, are the pre-requisites of non-violence tactics; a claim that ignited reflections and considerations on the political motivations of Digital Natives and the nature of the strategies behind digital activism.

The idea of nonviolence that underpin civil resistance or ‘civil disobedience’ if you will, as outlined in the foreword of Richard Gregg’s essay The Power of Nonviolence, had its origins in the Upanishads back in the 500 BC. Since then, it traveled through Buddhism, Jainism, Jesus, Socrates, and Tolstoy among others, before making its way back to India and Gandhi in 1910. Since then, this idea has gathered “meaning, momentum, organization, practical effectiveness and power” as non-violence tactics are put into action in several instances of political and social resistance. Dr. Gene Sharp drew for the first time in 1973 a list of one hundred ninety eight methods to engage in nonviolent protest, persuasion and noncooperation in his book The Politics of Nonviolent Action. This repository was taken up in 2011 by digital activism scholars Mary Joyce and Patrick Meier, who are identifying the ways in which these methods have been digitally enhanced, in their crowd-source project Civil Resistance 2.0. Regardless of the larger debate that evaluates the effectiveness of non-violent tactics to deter the use of violence, the conceptualization of non-violent civil resistance is a body of knowledge that has not been explored from the point of view of network and information societies as of yet (Joyce, 2011).

Furthermore, tracing the idea of non-violent resistance in the light of Gandhi’s legacies is an interesting point to discuss digital strategies towards change. Is digital activism mainstreaming the use and proliferation of non-violent tactics of protest, taking them from a booming trend to an advocacy norm? Do non-violent online tactics make offline self-sustainable and continuous change more likely? Are these methods more conducive to citizen engagement and a consequent behavioral change in everyday practices? To start answering these questions we will refer back to the principles of Ahimsa and Satyagraha taken up by Gandhi for civil disobedience, complement them with Gregg’s work of the power of nonviolence, and finally with Sharp’s work on the tactics and complexities of defiance, resistance and struggles with social, economic, environmental and political objectives. These three texts will dialogue throughout this entry with the objective of understanding the nature of these methods and how they touch on civic and digital natives’ engagement.

Digital nonviolence and collective action

In Christopher Chapple’s account of nonviolence in Asian traditions, he describes the fundamentals of Ahimsa or non-violence as “the absence of the desire to kill or harm”. This concept, coupled with Satyagraha, the ‘power of truth’, was translated into what is civil disobedience and non-cooperation. Both methods were utilized to break unjust laws back in Gandhi’s struggle for political independence from the British. Aside from the moral debate on what constitutes truth and evil, we can already identify a relationship between these precepts and what sustains collective action. Mario Diani identified “shared beliefs and ties of solidarity attached to specific collective events” and “political and cultural conflicts arising for social change” as two fundamental characteristics in all sorts of social movements. The power of non-violent action and large-scale disobedience requires the intervention of suitably organized and disciplined individuals, acting collectively to stand up against authorities such as the thousands of peasants who stood up against soldiers under Gandhi’s leadership, or the thousands of Egyptian citizens who distributed copies of Sharp’s work on 198 non-violent methods to foster civil resistance and overthrow Mubarak’s regime. As stated by Gregg, the approach unified Indians by giving them the necessary self-respect, self-reliance, courage and persistence to collectively withstand the resistance efforts that ultimately led them to independence. In other words, in the midst of different ‘truths’, a shared set of beliefs and the use of non-violent methods invoked unity among citizens.

How are digital technologies mainstreaming these methods in the social imaginary of digital natives? Collective action requires the mobilization, organization and coordination of “networks of informal interactions” according to Diani’s characterization. This task is being facilitated and amplified by rapid and low-cost communication enabled by digital technology as argued in Anastasia Kavada’s essay on digital activism. She adds that the potential of internet for social movement activities lies on the possibilities of information dissemination, decision-making, and a crucial pillar for citizen engagement: the building of trust and a sense of collective identity. Therefore, although connectivity and collectivity are indeed made more likely through technology, digital tools are still value and content neutral. The challenge for digital non-violent civil resistance is the degree to which it is appeals to the populace and persuades them into being actors of the movements as opposed to loosely connected by-standers; in other words, the need for Gandhian digital leaders that transmit the need and power of civic involvement and public opinion.

Individual and collective resistance

The concept of non-violent civil resistance should be feasible and desirable for the 21^st century digital native, both in the digital and offline realm due to its individual and collective possibilities. In terms of individual resistance; while collective defiance is powerful it starts through individual awareness and everyday actions that build up the public opinion (Gregg, 1960). As Nishant Shah notes while distinguishing resistance from revolution: resistance-based change comes about to correct failures of infrastructure, administration, policy or law, and is not only an integral part of the system but it is also an encouraged form of citizen action, among others (2011). Individuals have now broader options than before to exert this resistant, starting with Sharp’s list of 198 methods. From group-coordinated persuasion strategies including social non-cooperation boycotts, withdrawal from institutions to the use of arts and symbolisms and psychological interventions, there is plenty of room for creativity and action. Furthermore, 196 of these methods have been digitally enhanced through peer-production, self-broadcasting, media attention-competition and other methods which, according to Joyce and Meier, can be feasibly executed by the fluent digital native.

What is more, aside from coordinating offline activities, individuals can also exert civil disobedience on the online realm as demonstrated by Andrew Chadwick’s list of online defiance tactics in Internet Politics. Instances of hacktivism, denial-of-service boycotts and virtual sit-ins (Kavada, 20120) are a few examples of expressions of activism through non-cooperation that showcase the digital autonomy of netizens. For example, recently, the Vietnamese activist group Viet Tan launched a visible and creative online campaign showing citizens how to remove the block from the Facebook site, denouncing state’s censorship and advocating for freedom of expression through ethical hacking. Ultimately, non-violent resistance methods have never been as relevant as today, when citizens are recurring to new mechanisms of participation and contestation to claim their rights, reclaim citizenship and assert democratic freedoms through increased participation (Sharp, 2002; Khanna, 2012).

On the side of possibilities for enhanced collectivity, it is worth looking into the moral covenants present in social justice struggles. Gregg’s work, in spite of being written in 1935 and revised in 1960, provides a very up to date description of the power of information in network societies:

“Although there have been violations of moral laws in the world, there has never been such clear, strong recognition on the part of the holders of power of the importance of public opinion […] shown by propaganda and censorship practiced by governments and the press”.

Whether it comes from the state, civil society or the citizens; attempts to put justice, democracy and rightness at the forefront of all public discourse is today a norm, demonstrating the persuasive power of moral laws if put at the core of citizen action. Glasius and Pleyers also state that democracy, social justice and dignity are the main tenets of collective action enabling solidarity networks and the rise of a collective consciousness that transcends borders (2012). In this respect, it seems that connectivity and collectivity to engage in non-violent resistance is made more likely through technology, and although these tools remain ‘value neutral’, the processes of change will be defined by the consistency between methods and rhetoric brought forward by the citizen. This will also lead to a more complete model of citizenship as these individuals take ownership of the methods, content and the values cross-cutting both; not only for and during the protest, but as a value system defining coherent every day activities and the exercise of responsible democracy beyond the spectacle of mass protests (Pleyers, 2012; Shah, 2013).

Conclusion

Gandhi’s implementation of civil disobedience methods and his adherence to Ahimsa were the result of a combination of religious and cultural factors, which coupled with education and experience, deemed his beliefs a lifestyle as opposed to a mere political strategy. This reflection puts the citizen on the spot light. Having non-violent and digitally facilitated methods of protest and participation on hand what is defining the political motivations and engagement of the digital native? Having the flexibility to adapt these methods to their skills and lifestyles, what is holding back the civic energy of the 21st century citizen? According to Gaventa and Barrett, confidence, awareness and self-identity are the pre-conditions for citizenship and action. The first two can be fostered by non-violence: Sharp argues that experience in applying effective non-violent struggles increases self-confidence, while Gregg explains how unity is a result of adding oneself to a mass civil movement. The latter: self-identity and how the citizen looks at its role in the larger discourse of social struggles, as well as other factors that enhance its civic engagement, sense of citizenship and creativity in political movements, is a question I will leave open to explore in my following blog posts.

Sources

“198 Methods of Nonviolent Action” The Albert Einstein Institution http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations103a.html
“iRevolution. From Innovation to Revolution” last updated April 26, 2012 http://irevolution.net/tag/gene/
Chapple, Christopher. Nonviolence to animals, earth, and self in Asian traditions. SUNY Press, 1993.
Gaventa, John, and Gregory Barrett. "So what difference does it make? Mapping the outcomes of citizen engagement." IDS Working Papers 2010, no. 347 (2010): 01-72.
Gregg, Richard Bartlett, and Mahatma Gandhi. The power of non-violence. Clarke, 1960.
Horgan, John. “Egypt’s revolution vindicates Gene Sharp’s theory of nonviolent activism” Last updated February 11, 2010. Scientific American: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2011/02/11/egypts-revolution-vindicates-gene-sharps-theory-of-nonviolent-activism/
Joyce, Mary C. ed. Digital activism decoded: the new mechanics of change. IDEA, 2010.
Joyce, Mary. Last updated November 29, 2012. “Webinar on Digital Nonviolence” Meta-Activism: Activism analysis for the digital age. http://www.meta-activism.org/2012/11/wedinar-on-digital-nonviolence/
Khanna, Akshay. "Seeing Citizen Action through an ‘Unruly’Lens."Development 55, no. 2 (2012): 162-172.
Meier, Patrick. Last updated April 25, 2012. “Civil Resistance 2.0: A new database of methods” Meta-Activism: Activism analysis for the digital age http://www.meta-activism.org/2012/04/civil-resistance-2-0-a-new-database-of-methods/
Pleyers, Geoffrey. "Beyond Occupy: Progressive Activists in Europe." Open Democracy: free thinking for the world 2012 (2012): 5pages-8.
Sharp, Gene. "The politics of nonviolent action, 3 vols." Boston: Porter Sargent(1973).
Sharp, Gene “From Dictatorship to Democracy: A conceptual framework for liberation” The Albert Einstein Institution.(2010)
Travers, Will. “Civil disobedience for the digital age” Last updated December 23, 2010. Waging NonViolence http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/civil-disobedience-for-the-digital-age/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/digitally-enhanced-civil-resistance

Bangalore + Sustainability Summit

denisse — 2015-04-17T10:48:52Z

The power of technology to create youth engagement and positive social change were discussed at the Bangalore + Sustainability Summit on September 21, 2013 at the Centre for Internet and Society(CIS) , Bangalore. The event, in conjunction with the Social Good Summit that took place in New York during the same weekend, explored creative and tech-based avenues to solve sustainability challenges and promote social good.

Our interest in understanding the role of digital natives in our society stems from the possibilities technology brings for the social good. This concept, a variation of the notion of the ‘common good’, is nowadays a popular and widely utilized term, both in its secular and religious variations. It conveys values and actions that benefit the well-being of society and in Mill’s utilitarian view: one which promotes the moral, intellectual and active traits of its citizens. Nowadays, its social justice undertones are part of the human rights discourse that characterizes twenty-first century civil society and citizen action, which are at the same time becoming increasingly connected in the context of network societies, leading to the new socialized form of the common good. The buzzword was there at the core of the Social Good Summit that took place in New York from September 22 to 24, as well as of the Bangalore + Sustainability workshop, organized by Ashoka India in partnership with Green Lungi and IDEX on September 21 at CIS office in Bangalore.

Local leaders and change-makers in Bangalore discussed the power of technology and its potential to provide sustainable solutions for the city’s greatest challenges at the event. The workshop was dynamic in structure and inspiring in content, as the participants were divided into make-a-thon sessions to collaboratively design technology-based prototypes that tackle the problems with feasible and impactful solutions. In the opening session Meera Vijayann, consultant for Ashoka India, commented on the nature of sustainability and how technological design must tackle all of its fronts, including environmental, government, public and citizenship engagement, to name a few, establishing a working framework for the day. This was followed by four panelists who gave brief talks highlighting their professional backgrounds and some of the lessons learned in the pursuit of social good.

The first to present was Kuldeep Dantewadia, founder of Reap Benefit, a start-up that provides low-cost solutions to encourage behavioural change around waste, water and biodiversity management. Inspiring attendees to “be fools”, and take chances, based on Ranjan Maliks’s talk: The Fool and his kind of Innovation, he spoke about environmental issues as a man-made disease with behavioural solutions, as opposed to an external crisis requiring intervention. His social approach within a workshop discussing the power of technology was, as the representative of IDEX, Daniel Oxenhandler said, a great entry point to start thinking of the leaps of good-will and risks to be taken in the field of social change. Encouraging the participants to be foolish, he invited them to be bold and inventive with their ideas throughout the day.

He was followed by Raahul Khadaliya, who defines himself as a thinker, observer and explorer of design for sustainability. He delved on the ultimate purpose of design and framed it as a problem-solving tool that ought to bring benefits for the masses. Stressing that design is not only concerned about how tools works, but instead on “how they work in a given environment” he brought up the importance of context and historicity in design, an important discussion point , incidentally also explored by the ‘Making Change’ project by CIS in conjunction with the HIVOS Knowledge Program. Digital technologies and derived platforms do not carry value in themselves when pursuing social change, unless they speak to the locality and respond to the crises lingering in their given ecosystem. Khadaliya ended his presentation with a slide that read “design is a behaviour”, adding to the recurring theme of the day: the need for citizen behavioural change, being it in creation, participation or conservation of resources.

Coming from a different angle, Kalpana Kar, who contributed to the Bangalore Agenda Task Force in an urban governance project, gave an insightful account of the role of public policy and private-public partnerships. Her talk came across as an insightful set of advice tackling considerations around space and how it intersects with collectives and their sense of entitlement and territoriality. Notions of power, pride and hierarchical arrangements are determining accessibility to public spaces, a highly relevant reflection that also applies to digital participation in online platforms, as explored in the Digital Natives framework. She added that creating technological solutions with social impact calls for a change in our behaviour and how we gauge our individual needs against the social good. “Enthusiasm can take you far, but not further”, for which she appealed to participants to “be real, practical and foolish” in their interventions and focus on designs that have impact with scale and economic viability. This vision puts the private sector on a par with sustainability state policies, and sets the ground for mechanisms of social accountability as an important complement of technological design.

The last panelist Sharath Chandra Ram, researcher at the Centre for Internet and Society and instructor at the Srishti School of Art, Design & Technology brought the aforementioned points together and based his talk on alternatives to bridge the distance between the citizen and the state through online-offline interventions. He focused on the enabling of citizen voices and freedoms in governance as a fundamental mandate for tech innovators of our times. “Models must maintain cultural specificities and have a holistic approach” to facilitate engagement in the globalized socio-political arena. He provided three of examples of citizen involvement in information and state governance: citizen journalism, citizen uprisings and citizen governance, coupled with a showcase of low-cost technologies designed at the CIS Metaculture Media Lab that would allow larger online access and offline participation if made pervasive. His pragmatic approach provided tangible and innovative examples, using every day apparatuses, to enable connection and overcome the social and political roadblocks in our networks; an interesting and inspiring segue into team formation and the make-a-thon to come up next.

Following the panel, the 40+ participants divided into working groups moderated by the organizers and delved into discussion on one out the five proposed problem statements: road safety, waste management, gender-inclusive spaces, forestation and public infrastructures. Brainstorm props provided, the groups created mind maps, Lego structures and comic strips to shape, frame and later pitch their idea to the rest of the workshop. While the use of technology was mandatory, the social good impact brought forward by these apps and campaigns took precedence in the presentations. The event all in all embodied an opportunity to bring ideas, skills and experience together from their different walks of life and yield innovation. In fact, as Ira Snissar, Venture Associate for Ashoka mentioned in her closing speech: three or four of the presented ideas had the potential to comprise business plans for future start-ups. The remark concluded the session by highlighting the need to create marketable and economically viable solutions to ensure sustainability of social good tools in market systems, defeating the long-standing tensions between corporate interests and social responsibility.

The four themes brought forward by the panelists: audacious innovation, large-scale design, power negotiations and citizen governance, as well as the group discussions reiterated a fundamental idea throughout the day: the need for behavioral change in the name of social good. While the state, the private sector and of course technologies were present as important actors in the making of change, the citizen was framed as the main engine and beneficiary of these processes. Stronger citizen engagement, improved negotiation between individual and collective needs, and diminished contestation in spaces of power are among the main objectives to attain these long-sought social good objectives. Technological solutions come across as enablers and amplifiers, perhaps necessary in a networked environment, yet not sufficient if not coupled with sustainable behavioural change. In this respect the question that should precede events like this one should focus on the substance behind the summit’s buzzword: what does ‘the social good’ entail? And attempt to understand the alignments of these understandings considering different models of citizenship and activism.

As of now, the implications and nuances of the social good remain under-theorized and lack epistemological consensus, yet the concept still represents an interesting pathway of research within the Digital Natives project. Is it possible to instill the need for behavioural change in the social imaginary? Is it feasible to establish solidarity networks through pervasive technologies? These are some of the avenues to be taken at the aftermath of the Bangalore + Sustainability event. The willingness to work together towards what benefits all was very prominent in the summit, suggesting that the feel-good nature of the concept and its social justice foundations make it a powerful drive to mobilize people and ideas. The challenge remains on how to extrapolate it and as advised by the panelists, have it derive into large scale impact among the masses.

Sources:

“7 Definitions 4 Social Good” Armchair Advocates. Last modified August 21^st, 2012. Accessed September 23^rd, 2013http://armchairadvocates.com/2012/08/21/the-7-definitions-4-social-good-back2school-yourself-series/
“Mill’s Moral and Political Philosophy” Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Last modified October 9^th, 2007. Accessed September 23^rd, 2013 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mill-moral-political/#LibDemComGoo
Shah, Nishant “Whose Change is it Anyways? Hivos Knowledge Program. April 30, 2013
“Social Good Summit 2013” accessed September 23^rd, 2013, http://mashable.com/sgs/#about
“Social Good Summit: Ashoka India”, accessed September 23^rd, 2013, http://www.plussocialgood.org/Post/social-good-summit-ashoka-india/836a3a1e-ea21-4a96-bdbd-bb4fe58a8612

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/bangalore-sustainability-summit

Revealing Protesters on the Fringe: Crucifixion Protest in Paraguay

denisse — 2015-04-17T10:51:56Z

An analysis of the crucifix protest in Paraguay in the light of Nishant Shah’s piece: Whose Change is it Anyway? The blog post looks at the physical and symbolic spaces in which narratives of change were conceived and the extent to which information circulating within activates citizen action.

“What constitutes change? What are the intentions that make change possible? Who are the actors involved?” These are the questions with which Nishant Shah opens the thought piece ‘Whose Change is it Anyway’, a series of reflections and provocations exploring the future of citizen action and digital technologies in emerging information societies. The project, in collaboration with the HIVOS Knowledge Program, begins a process of unlearning conventional understandings of ‘change’ and redefining it in the light of less visible narratives of political, social and cultural transformation. Three pivots of analysis are at the backbone of this piece. First, it locates change by looking at the historicity and stressing the role of invisible crises that lead to digital activism. Second, it moves on to unpack our definition of change and the language framing activism as system-overhaul practices rather reformative experiments. Third, it looks at the outcomes of change proposing a redefinition of failure that enables us to recognize instances of change outside of what is dubbed ‘successful’ citizen action. All in all, the piece is reflective rather than conclusive and when paired up with contemporary events of political and social change, it serves as a framework to challenge existing paradigms and overlooked narratives.

This was precisely my experience when at the end of August I came across the Paraguayan crucifix protest in the BBC News website: the story of eight bus drivers who led by union leader Juan Villalba, crucified themselves onto wooden crosses to protest against labour exploitation in Asuncion.[1] In spite of its international media coverage, the protest has to this day failed to mobilize digitally fluent Paraguayan and global netizens into joining the ranks[2] of their plea, keeping protesters at the fringes of the online sphere. This is surprising compared to other publicized Paraguayan protests, such as Pro-Ache Tribe campaigns back in 2011[3] and the anti-corruption protests earlier this year,[4] which featured politically active students mobilizing through technology to influence public policy in Paraguay.


				Video of crucifixion protest

Before jumping into deeming the crucifix protest a success or a failure, I would like to refer back to the first axis of analysis in Shah’s work and discuss the history, context and structures in which the intent for change was crafted. I will follow Anat-Ben David´s framework based on her research on the geopolitics of digital spaces, and look at how “hybrid geographical and digital spaces” intertwine with “situated knowledges and practices” in order to localize change (2011). I will first focus on the political and social context of Paraguay and how it framed two online campaigns: the Aché Tribe campaign in 2011 and the anti-corruption campaign in June 2013. Then, I will move on to the symbolic and knowledge context in Paraguay and how it determined the outcome of the offline crucifix protest in August 2013. The objective is to identify the factors that drove the first two issues into the online sphere vis-a-vis those that impeded the latter from making that transition. This will be instrumental to understand what —and what not— activates youth mobilization and citizen action in Paraguay and how their vision of change aligns with their experience in crises.

Political and social context of Paraguay

Landlocked, Catholic and mestizo, Paraguay was under a 30 year oppressive dictatorship that finally came to an end in 1989. Since then, the succeeding thirteen years of democracy have been characterized by citizen upheavals, as younger generations are breaking the silence and conformity of older times (Zavala, 2011). Among the most pressing issues addressed by coup attempts, strikes and protests,[5] corruption remains the standing evil in the Paraguayan political system. Seventy-eight per cent of its citizens perceive the government as ineffective at fighting corruption,[6] and with good reason. Paraguay is ranked as the second most corrupt country in Latin America and 24th in the world, according to Transparency International.[7] The Paraguayan head of Seeds for Democracy, Marta Ferrara commented on corruption being absolute in the public sector due to the legacy of dictatorship, and hence called civil society groups to exert more pressure on the government to fight it.[8] This sentiment is consistent with the loss of faith in democracy in Latin America to which research has attributed the rise of the left and a growing desire for social change (Barret et al, 2008).

Another important contextual question to consider on a par is how relevant are digital technologies in Paraguay to mobilize change. The country has one of the lowest rates of internet penetration in the continent at 27.1 per cent, [9] suggesting that the remaining 70 per cent is comprised of disconnected Guarani voices whose stories remain untold. This is in a country with a 52.4 Gini coefficient, where 40 per cent of citizens live below the poverty line and 56 per cent of the income is controlled by the upper 20 per cent.[10]

Delving deeper into this divide, we can infer that the success behind the digitally enabled protests comes as a result of socioeconomic inequality and an alignment of the interests of this privileged class and the issues behind their actions. Based on this profile, my follow up questions are a) what is the common thread joining the online campaigns that is absent from the crucifix protest and b) how this digital class is defining these priorities.

The anti-corruption discourse
The legacy of the dictatorship and the anti-corruption discourse is a strong response to the first question. While the concept of corruption is severely stigmatized in society, it is also very loosely defined (Harrison, 2006), making it a versatile stimuli for change. Harrison states that in developing countries, the focus remains on the perception of the relationship between the state and those they are meant to be serving (2006), while for Haller and Shore it also refers to money transactions within power relationships that stratify and exclude in any structure (2005). In this way, the concept remains all-encompassing, perception-based and relevant to the democracy crisis in Paraguay. Hence, protesting against it is locally appropriate, and fits in the moral project Sampson dubbed the global anti-corruption industry (2010). He argues that condemning corruption is now a global trend grounded on uncontested ‘good governance´ and integrity values. Its rhetoric has been mainstreamed and infused with a “feel good character” that turns it into an appealing campaign, easy to identify with, simple to embark on and consistently present in the human-rights discourse both in the online and offline sphere.

The anti-corruption protest in June and the Pro-Aché mobilization in 2011 fit this criterion. In the first case, 3000 Paraguayans took to the streets inspired by neighbouring Brazil´s anti-corruption protests[11] to condemn a new retirement law project for parliamentarians that allowed them to retire after only ten years of public service. Framed as an indicator of state inefficiency, the online campaign PorUnParaguayMejor [For a better Paraguay] went viral compelling students to mobilize against the project in Asuncion.[12] The event was reported immediately by international media publicizing Paraguayan youth as revolutionary agents of change.[13]


	Above: "[Parlamentarians] are retiring in 10 years and demanding full pension (100% of their salaries). Paraguay, take the streets and denounce them", (pictured by Global Voices online: http://bit.ly/1aXGzA7)

The second case was also based on state inefficiency experienced by a specific community: the Aché indigenous tribe. The dispute was a consequence of the Ministry of Environment dishonouring an agreement and not granting property titles of the land Finca 470 to the tribe. As a result, a group of young Paraguayans created social media accounts to organize food and clothes drives, mobilize protests, attract further attention from the press and communicate horizontally with government authorities. Due to their extensive lobbying, the authorities acceded to declare the land an indigenous reserve for the Aché, making it another hailed example of successful technology usage by youth (Zavala, 2011).[14]

Above: Members of the Aché tribe take to the streets in Paraguay (photo courtesy Sulekha: http://bit.ly/1aPxeXv).

In both cases, the vaguely defined corruption was at the core of citizens’ claims. In the first one, the general outrage and dutifulness drove citizens into the anti-corruption discourse both on the online and offline spheres. Based on Shah’s conceptualization of the technologies of the state (2013), the issue of corruption was perceived as a threat to the survival of the citizen and its rights, and created a generalized sense of precariousness among the populace. Ergo, they intervened to secure their future and as put by Sampson, to convey the message that they ‘were doing something’ about it regardless of whether that ‘something’ would have a long-term structural impact.

On the other hand, the second online protest had a more altruistic tone. The members of the digitally privileged 30 per cent, in spite of not being directly implicated in the conflict, took the disconnected group’s plea and mobilized support networks on their behalf. Although the Aché did not request this intervention, nor intend to utilize technology during their camped protests, the digital group’s strategy was largely more effective at bringing the issues to the attention of media and the government. The successful mainstreaming of the Aché’s story upon being digitalized questions the extent to which staged protests will remain appropriate in information societies vis-à-vis online campaigning.

These developments show how the anti-corruption discourse not only mobilizes citizens in Paraguay but also their power and resources. Therefore, if corruption is the common thread we are looking for, to what extent is it applicable to other social conflicts? Will good governance values always trump individual pursuits of assurance? In the following section I will return to the crucifix protests in the light of the aforementioned and address non-geographical spaces of knowledge and practices, as recommended by Ben-Davis. This will shed light on this question and on the spectrum of citizen motivations framing how digital actors articulate change.

Knowledge, Symbolisms and Visibility

Yochai Benkler describes our networked society as an economy centered on information, cultural production and the manipulation of symbols (2006). These contain and pertain to different ways of understanding the world. In the optimistic view of Benkler, digital technologies enable these views to circulate freely in our network; amplifying all voices, however, as seen in the case of Paraguay, information is being produced by one sector of society that determines and constrains the visibility of other worldviews; reproducing socioeconomic inequalities in the digital sphere. In this section I will look at how different articulations of the present and the conflict between spaces of knowledge and symbolisms derive into different ways of telling the same story, in the light of the extremely visual crucifix protest.

The protest had a very different impact in the national scene, as opposed to its portrayal in international media. This is because crucifixes had already been staged in the past by people of indigenous descent[15] or union workers[16] to call for the attention of the Paraguayan state. Being a predominantly Catholic country, utilizing the charged image of the crucifixion of Jesus is the equivalent of cultural bandwagoning on its symbols of self-sacrifice and martyrdom. Eric Tyler reflecting on activism martyrs in the light of the role Khalid Saed in the Arab Spring, called them “catalysts with a profound amplifying impact when combined with the viral force of technology”.[17] Amy Sample Ward added another lesson from Egypt, noting that you do not need a high penetration rate in order for massive impact to occur, “as long as the community is connected”.[18] If the digital class had taken on the bus drivers case in the same way they supported the Aché, mobilization would have been likely. However, the cause did not resonate with the Paraguayan digital public. This lack of connection did not derive from the digital divide, but instead from the long-standing conflict between the transport sector and the citizens.

There are several points to be made about this case of citizen inaction. First, the citizen-market crisis played a large role in creating apathy around the crucifix protest. Shah states that technologies of the market must “assure us of the future in terms of material resources and infrastructures upon which happiness depend” (2013), which was not being delivered by the CETRAPAM (Transport Companies of the Metropolitan Area) in the eyes of the citizen. The CETRAPAM director is perceived as corrupt and inefficient[19] and earlier that month a transportation strike left 700,000 immobilized.[20] These incidents resulted in a citizen online campaign demanding a reliable and transparent service from the companies[21] having anti-corruption, once again, at the core of their claims.

This background determined how national media reproduced the crucifix protest story. ABC, one of the largest news corporations in the country, covered the story portraying drivers as ‘aichinjaranga’s” (‘poor little thing’ in Guaraní), who were appealing to “wake people up through pity and pressure, not resources.[22] On the other hand, the most popular entry on the topic in Crónicas Ciudadanas (ABC’s citizen journalism forum) reads: “We [Luque citizens] are tired. These drivers waste our time and we are sick of it.”[23] The digital class, having the power and resources to mobilize, chose to remain idle in order to disempower a group that has been causing precariousness in their present and future establishing a hierarchy of citizen priorities. By withdrawing their support, the drivers are now left with offline strategies and conventional protest tools to address their demands with only the support of their immediate community.[24] It is unclear whether this will represent a disadvantage for their ability to create structural change, but it does show that internal citizen crises leads to inequality of strategies and resources for mobilization.

Second, this case also highlights the dark side of Benkler’s argument in favour of citizen information production. He claims that citizen journalism curbs the power away from mass media and hands it over to autonomous citizens who can now exchange information, making them less susceptible to manipulation by the owners of communications infrastructure and media (2006). In the case of Paraguay, this power has been handed over to the digitally fluent who are only putting forward causes aligned with their interests and value scheme.Issues of access and digital inclusion come afloat, as the disconnected status of the crucifix protesters keeps them out of social spaces of debate and political conversation. This deems social status a determining factor between “statements that are heard and those that wallow in obscurity” (Benkler, 2006) and a serious constraint for the fulfillment of the drivers’ capabilities and freedoms.

Third, the use of symbols is effective depending on the audience, as shown by the narrative of international news corporations. The use of crucifixes came across as an ancient and peculiar tool protest for western media — especially in the digital era— earning them a space in the global public’s interest eighteen days into the protest. As commented by Al Jazeera’s opinion columnist Courtney Martin, in the light of the Tibetan self-immolations in February,[25]“in a world that tends to shine new power [on] online activism only”, other people need to resort to “attention-getting schemes on the hopes of calling attention to issues that remain unresolved”.[26]

The highly visual crucifixes caught the attention of the international media, yet the focus remained on the props instead of the underlying issues around union workers’ rights. This was evident on the picture included by the CNN, showing the workers lined up on their crosses lying next to a coffin claiming that this will become their "final resting place" if their demands were not met;[27] adding to the thriller effect of what is in fact a social justice crisis.


Crucified bus drivers in Paraguay (pictured by CNN International), http://bit.ly/1fpxKvs

In regards to the audience’s response, I would dare to speculate that the absence of the “language of revolution” that surrounds hyped narratives around digital activism (such as the June anti-corruption campaign accounts) played a role in the inactivity from international human-rights activism communities. Being a global audience “engaged with a spectacle of the rise of the citizen” (Shah, 2013), information circulating through mass media is either discarding or othering the less attractive, under-the-radar citizen struggles that do not fit this sale pitch. If a show must be staged in order to attain global attention, it is only natural to wonder if this plot will require a dramatic twist to become viral, one of the key ingredients for effective information dissemination according to Mary Joyce (2010). Having the protesters reach “the end” in order to achieve attention and support, is evidence of some of the morbid criterion steering our motivations for change.

Conclusion

This analysis localized some of the invisible conflicts underpinning action for change in Paraguay. Rather than focusing on a specific cause, such as workers’ rights; through a particular method, say crucifixions; I have looked at the structures framing the understandings around citizen action. It attempted to go beyond the spectacle of digital mobilization and instead look at two spaces: the geopolitical context of Paraguay and the symbolic knowledge framing the development of the crucifix protest in Asuncion, and how the bus drivers envisioned their future before and after the protest.

The Paraguayan political and social imaginary and their understanding of change are infused with the historicity of corruption. As explored in the first section, campaigning against corruption in Paraguay has risen as a convenient check-and-balance, citizen-led strategy to demand transparency and accountability from state and market actors. It fosters values of responsible citizenship and is endorsed by the national and international community. The prevalence of this discourse, even if it worked against the crucifix protest, is an indicator that ‘making change’ is not necessarily understood as a practice of material transformation in Paraguay, but that is has been legitimized at the stage of awareness and political engagement without tying citizens into long-term advocacy efforts.

The actions and reactions around the crucifix protest varied in the online and the offline sphere. In the online realm, the story was orchestrated by the group with access to information and communication technologies. The bus drivers, having remained at the fringes of digital production, had no control whatsoever of how their narrative was shaped by citizen journalists, national or international media. This was reflected in the offline sphere, where the lack of support to the protesters was a result of market-citizen conflicts and the inability of the crucifix symbolisms to speak to an urban population. These factors also show how socioeconomic divides at the political and knowledge levels were digitalized, determining information production, dissemination and reproduction as well as responses to the protesters’ narratives in the long-run.

In conclusion, this analysis has offered a broader view of how change is understood, in terms of the socioeconomic and information constraints in the making of change in Paraguay. Altruistic activism is only possible when the cause being fought for does not jeopardize the interests and assurances of a powerful class who is in control of the resources for online mobilization, in spite of the social justice nature of the claim. Some questions remain unresolved, particularly in regards to how digital activity is overshadowing offline initiatives in a spectacle driven environment. An interesting research avenue relevant to the larger project of ‘Whose Change is it Anyway?’ would be to collect narratives and stories of change that gauge the relevance of offline protests, to understand if they can remain relevant and appropriate in information societies and whether we, as an audience and potential supporters, are only defining change and citizen action in light of its digital possibilities.

[1]. “Sacked Paraguay bus drivers stage crucifixion protest” BBC News Latin America & Caribbean. August 28, 2013, accessed August 30, 2013, http://bbc.in/17n5NSm.

[2]. “Choferes de la linea 30 en huelga” ABC Color, September 4, 2013. Accessed September 6^th, 2013, http://bit.ly/1ffyGp3.

[3]. “Indígenas Ache Acampan frente a SEAM y piden transferencia tierras ancestrales” Ultima Hora. March 14th, 2011. Accessed September 18th, http://bit.ly/15aszv5.

[4]. Agencia EFE, “Protestas contra presunta corrupción en Paraguay”, Caracol Radio Colombia. June 22, 2013, accessed August 30,2013, http://bit.ly/1aPHfEn.

[5]. BBC Timeline: Paraguay. Last modified July 3^rd, 2012, http://bbc.in/B6UFV.

[6]. Alexander E.M. Hess and Michael Sauter. “The Most Corrupt Countries in the World”, 24/7: Wall Street: Insightful Analysis and Commentary for U.S. & Global Equity Investors. July 11, 2013. Accessed August 30, 2013, http://bit.ly/16jVxrE.

[7]. Corruption Perceptions Index 2012”, http://bit.ly/TBjshd.

[8]. “Paraguay’s Cartes: The man to lead anti-corruption efforts?” Thomson Reuters Foundation, May 3^rd, 2013. Accessed: September 10, 2013, http://bit.ly/1aXTd28.

[9]. "Percentage of Individuals using the Internet 2000-2012", International Telecommunications Union (Geneva), June 2013, accessed August 30, 2013, http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/statistics/2013/Individuals_Internet_2000-2012.xls.

[10].The World Bank “Poverty Gap at the Poverty Line” Catalogue Sources: World Development Indicators. Accessed September 10, 2013 http://bit.ly/14oMRDI.

[11]. RT Actualidad, “La ola de protestas de Brasil ‘rompe fronteras’ y ya salpica a Paraguay” RT Noticias, June 22, 2013, accessed August 30,2013, http://bit.ly/1aBAqqj.

[12]. Agencia EFE, “Protestas contra presunta corrupción en Paraguay”, Caracol Radio Colombia. June 22, 2013, accessed August 30, 2013, http://bit.ly/1aPHfEn.

[13]. Gabriela Galilea “The Brazil Effect: Thousands Protest for a Better Change” Global Voices English June 26, 2013. Accessed August 30, 2013, http://bit.ly/15FKwAW.

[14]. For further information on the Pro-Aché online campaign, refer to Maria del Mar Zavala’s essay: Youth and Technology: An Unstoppable Force.

[15]. Protesters in Paraguay staged a public crucifixion in the past calling for a jailed former army general General Lino Oviedo to be set free. “Paraguay man crucified in public” BBC News November 30, 2006. Accessed on September 10, 2013, http://bbc.in/1aPI7Zq. Also see "Homeless in Paraguay protest with Crucifixion” Cleveland News. August 6^th, 2009. Accessed September 20, 2013, http://bit.ly/1gGyZHk.

[16]. A bus driver crucified himself for more than 10 hours demanding the recognition of his labor union. “Se crucifico para lograr el reconocimiento sindical” ABC Color, July 6, 2013. Accessed on September 10, 2013, http://bit.ly/1buNKiL.

[17]. Mary Joyce, January 27, 2012 comment on Arab Spring: “The Meta-Activism Community Reflects” Meta-Activism Blog, http://bit.ly/wfXhiW.

[18]. Mary Joyce, comment on Arab Spring.

[19]. 40 companies went on strike demanding further subsidies from the government, paralyzing public transport in Asuncion and leaving almost 700,000 immobilized. As a result, citizens organized a mobilization through Facebook to denounce corruption in the CETRPAM and demand an efficient transportation system, http://bit.ly/15I7Mnl.

[20]. Gabriela Galilea, “Public Transit Strike Paralyzes Paraguay” Global Voices English. Translated by Victoria Robertson. August 8, 2013. Accessed on September 10, 2013, http://bit.ly/1bdllum.

[21]. Gabriela Galilea, “Public Transit Strike Paralyzes Paraguay”.

[22]. “Huelguistas quieren despertar lástima según gerente de Línea 30” ABC Color, September 4, 2013. Accessed on September 10, 2013, http://bit.ly/1ffyGp3.

[23]. ABC Color “Choferes de la linea 30 en Huelga”.

[24]. “Sindicalistas de Paraguay fueron recibidos por el presidente tras jornadas de protestas” Telesur, September 4, 2013. Accessed on September 10, 2013. http://bit.ly/14kntkF.

[25]. “The 100^th Self-Immolation in Tibet – A case for the world to answer” Central Tibetan Administration, February 14, 2013. Accessed on September 10, 2013, http://bit.ly/X65jvA.

[26]. Courtney E Martin “Building a slower, longer fire among the digital flares” Al Jazeera English, February 4, 2013. Accessed on August 30, 2013, http://aje.me/X9YNDj.

[27]. Rafael Romo “Fired Paraguayan bus drivers crucify themselves in protest” CNN International. August 31, 2013. Accessed August 31, 2013, http://bit.ly/1fpxKvs.

Sources

Ben-David, Anat “Digital Natives and the return of the local cause” Digital AlterNatives with a Cause – Book One: To Be. (2011) 10 -22.
Barrett, P. S., Chavez, D., & Garavito, C. A. R. The new Latin American left: utopia reborn. Pluto Press, 2008.
Benkler, Yochai. The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. Yale University Press, 2006.
Harrison, Elizabeth. "Unpacking the anti-corruption agenda: dilemmas for anthropologists." Oxford Development Studies 34, no. 1 (2006): 15-29.
Haller, C. & Shore, C. (Eds) Corruption: Anthropological Perspectives London: Pluto Press (2005).
Joyce, Mary C., ed. Digital activism decoded: the new mechanics of change. IDEA, 2010.
Sampson, Steven. "The anti-corruption industry: from movement to institution."Global Crime 11, no. 2 (2010): 261-278.
Shah, Nishant “Whose Change is it Anyways? Hivos Knowledge Program. April 30, 2013.
Zavala, Maria del Mar “Youth and Technology: An Unstoppable Force” Digital AlterNatives with a Cause- Book Three: To Act (2011) 46-53.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/revealing-protesters-on-the-fringe

Whose Change is it Anyway?

nishant — 2015-04-17T10:56:47Z

This thought piece is an attempt to reflect critically on existing practices of “making change” and its implications for the future of citizen action in information and network societies. It observes that change is constantly and explicitly invoked at different stages in research, practice, and policy in relation to digital technologies, citizen action, and network societies.

The White Paper by Nishant Shah was published by Hivos recently.

However, we do not have adequate frameworks to address the idea of change. What constitutes change? What are the intentions that make change possible? Who are the actors involved? Whose change is it, anyway?

Drawing on the Hivos Knowledge Programme and on knowledge frameworks around youth, technology, and change from the last four years, this thought piece introduces new ways of defining, locating, and figuring change. In the process, it also helps understand the role that digital technologies play in shaping and amplifying our processes and practices of change, and to understand actors of change who are not necessarily confined to the category of “citizen”, which seems to be understood as the de facto agent of change in contemporary social upheavals, political uprisings, and cultural innovations.

Methodologically, this thought piece attempts to make three discursive interventions: It locates digital activism in historical trajectories, positing that digital activism has deep ties to traditional activism, when it comes to the core political cause. Simultaneously, it recognises that new modes of political engagement are demanding and producing novel practices and introducing new actors and stakeholders. It looks at contemporary digital and network theories, but also draws on older philosophical lineages to discuss the crises that we seek to address. It tries to interject these abstractions and theoretical frameworks back into the field by producing two case studies that show how engagement with these questions might help us reflect critically on our past practices and knowledge as well as on visions for and speculations about the future, and how these shape contemporary network societies. It builds a theoretical framework based on knowledge gleaned from conversations, interviews, and on-the-ground action with different groups and communities in emerging information societies, and integrates with new critical theory to build an interdisciplinary and accessible framework that seeks to inform research, development-based interventions, and policy structures at the intersection of digital technologies, citizen action, and change by introducing questions around change into existing discourse.

Click to download the full White Paper here (PDF, 321 Kb)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/hivos-knowledge-programme-june-14-2013-nishant-shah-whose-change-is-it-anyway

The Stranger with Candy

nishant — 2015-04-17T11:00:04Z

Beware of online threats, as the distinction between friends and foes is false on the internet.

Nishant Shah's column was published in the Indian Express on June 16, 2013.

My parents and I were in Oslo, when after a long day in the city, we returned to an intriguing situation. My father, who is quite a digital migrant and uses the internet for daily exchanges, found an email from an uncle waiting in his inbox. The email begins with the uncle travelling to Madrid, Spain, to help an ailing cousin who needs a surgery and requested that my father help the writer, his cousin, with €2,500. The email ended with a note of urgency, "I will check my email every 30 minutes for your reply".

My father, who was by now rather agitated, asked my brother and me what could be done. People asking for money over email is the modern day equivalent of strangers bearing candy in a car. We were both immediately wary and when we saw the mail, we knew that it was a scam. Somebody had cracked into somebody's account and was now sending out emails to everybody in their contact list, hoping to make a quick buck. The only action we took was to inform the relative that his account seemed to have been compromised and that he needed to protect it.

This incident, in the context of disallowing children below 13 years on Facebook in India, got me thinking. How do we trust somebody, or something online? There is a presumption that digital natives instinctively know how to deal with dubious situations online. True, one seldom hears of a digital native falling for scams of Nigerian princes offering their inheritance or widows of bank managers in Saudi Arabia wanting to transfer millions to their bank accounts. But that might be because digital natives live more in gift and attention economies and have always been suspicious of anybody waving a wad of notes.

However, we do know that the young are often susceptible to other predators on the Web. While it might occasionally seem that the West's paranoia around paedophiles online, preying on young children as sexual victims might have reached the limits of logical absurdity, it remains indisputable that young adults haven't yet developed the codes to trust somebody online. We encounter countless stories of the young who endanger their futures by documenting their follies and foibles in the unforgiving and unforgetting space of the internet. Let us not forget the names of Adnan Patrawala and Koushambi Layek, who fell prey to strangers pretending to be friends and lovers on the social networking site Orkut.

I am not suggesting that the World Wide Web is any more dangerous than the brick and mortar world that we live in. Our flesh- and-bone bodies are under equal danger in our everyday lives. But over time, we have learned and have been taught how to decode conditions that might harm us. We have learned to distance ourselves from strangers with grins, and people who look hostile. The authorities have created visible signposts of danger all around us — from red traffic lights to surveillance cameras — that constantly remind us that safety is not the default mode of our existence but something that we need to incessantly create for ourselves.

The digital world has no such guidelines. The mammoth corporations, which now govern a large part of the cyberspace, individually try to create structures that would save us from falling victim to such attacks. So the filter on your Gmail account is an intelligent system that scans every byte of information that goes in and out of your inbox, learning both your behaviour patterns and your interaction modes, to filter out not only the obvious hoax emails but also things that you might deem as clutter. Smart browsers like Firefox identify IP addresses that are regularly abusive and warn us about installing any software that might originate there. On Facebook, certain pictures and posts with offensive content are censored even before they get into your data stream. The friendship algorithm, further ensures that you increasingly see content from your 'close friends' rather than strangers. In all these mechanisms, which use big data mining tools to recognise harmful patterns as well as encourage you to devise your own vouchsafes, there is an implicit understanding that the people we know will do us less harm. They are designed to keep out unwanted or potentially harmful people because it might lead to danger or conflict.

However, as we saw in the case of the email to my father, the distinctions between strangers and friends on the internet, is a forced one. When all digital avatars are a performance of a kind, it becomes easy for an imposter to take on that identity. The only credentials we have of somebody's authenticity are often their user accounts and email — data which can be stolen and manipulated effortlessly. And increasingly, we have learned that when it comes to the online world, the people who infect us with viruses, rob us of our money and crash our digital worlds are people who are our 'friends'.

While we shall learn through experience and through stories, there remains a need to develop a larger social discussion around trust online. This debate cannot be whether content needs to be censored online or whether certain groups should be allowed to get on to social network systems. Instead, it has to be a debate that realises the notions of friendship and trust, of networks and connections, are not merely extensions of the physical into the digital. On the infobahn, these are new modes of operation and being and it is not going to be easy to create a handbook of online safety. What we will need is an involved and inter-generational debate about the social, political and economic safety online and create signposts that remind us of the dangers of being online.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/indian-express-june-16-2013-nishant-shah-the-stranger-with-candy

Not Just Fancy Television

nishant — 2015-04-24T11:45:14Z

Nishant Shah reviews Ben Hammersley's book "64 Things You Need to Know for Then: How to Face the Digital Future Without Fear ", published by Hodder & Stoughton

The review was published in the Indian Express on December 8, 2012.

Let us begin by acknowledging that when the world was learning how to drive on the information highway, Ben Hammersley was out there, instructing us how to do it best. So it doesn’t surprise that 64 Things You Need to Know for Then: How to Face the Digital Future Without Fear, despite its untweetable title, is quite spot-on when it comes to describing our digital pasts, demystifying our interweb presents and preparing us for technosocial futures. Well-written, interspersed with illustrative anecdotes, reflective experiences and speculative ideas, the book looks at the good, the bad and the downright bizarre that the digital turn has introduced in our lives. Working through moments of nostalgia for things that have already become obsolete, and through experiences that morph even before we can comprehend them, Hammersley writes (or, as he suggests in his introduction — co-writes with hundreds of anonymous contributors) a book that is readable, for those seeking to understand how the digital world moves and those who want to remember their own role in shaping forgotten trends.

The book also attempts to answer some of the troublesome tensions in our understanding of our contemporary digital lives. Hammersley’s basic intention in writing the book is to show how technological shifts are not merely about changing usage patterns. It radically (and often dramatically) restructures our domains of life, language and labour. Older structures have become redundant and the new ones have not yet found their feet. There are many who attempt to think of the internet as a mere extension of older media practices. But as he says, “The internet is absolutely not just fancy television.” It is a technology that is reshaping everything we had understood about who we are and how we relate to the world around us.

However, Hammersley suggests, the ways in which the internet is rapidly transforming the world leads to a clear divide around technology literacy. The “technologically literate” are shaping the digital turn, experimenting and exploring the possibilities, but unable to fall back upon older structures of assurance to know whether the choices they are making are sustainable. At the same time, the “technologically illiterate” are still responsible for shaping a world that they are quickly losing track of.

This book clearly explains the technological, legal, cultural, social and economic shifts of the last 20 years, and how they foretell our futures, without complicating it with geeky discourses on code or theoretical bluster.

Hammersley also ensures that the book is not merely a glossary of terms. He has the most interesting anecdotes from around the world like Harry Potter fan-fiction and crowdsourced translations in Germany challenging intellectual property rights regimes, the Human Flesh Search Engines in China, which threaten to reinforce regressive mob politics while also enabling cultural vigilantes in our societies. He also goes beyond individual concerns and reflects on the larger political concerns of censorship, control and freedom, discussing with great lucidity, the complicated nuances of hacker groups like Anonymous, political effects of collectives like WikiLeaks, etc. It is an exciting mash-up of events that will make you smile at the audacity and irreverence of the players in the digital playground, but will also make you shiver as it lays bare the new authoritarian and violent regimes that emerge with digital technologies.

Instead of taking partisan positions about something as necessarily good or bad, Hammersley documents some of the practices, effects and affects of technology, to show how our world has changed. There is no explanation of why the list stops at 64 things. But it is a well curated list of social, cultural, economic and political concerns and provides a conversational account of the present and future, speculating, like an old friend on the living room couch on a Sunday afternoon.

The only criticism against Hammersley is that he is too dependent on the rules of the internet to explain the internet. The different laws that have evolved in computing and network theory, in the sociology of the Web and the economic analysis of information societies, are accepted too easily, and used as self-evident explanatory frameworks. But then, this is not a book pretending to argue for a new conceptual framework. It is a book that has set out to educate and entertain, slowly unfolding the fractured narratives of the Web from its military origins to its Arab Spring manifestations. Of the many books that are already flooding the market, trying to decode the Web, Hammersley’s list of 64 things is going to be at the top.

The writer is Director (Research), Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/indian-express-december-8-2012-nishant-shah-not-just-fancy-television

Whose Change Is It Anyway? | DML2013

nishant — 2015-04-24T11:47:19Z

As a preparation for the DML conference, Nishant Shah had an interview with Howard Rheingold, a cyberculture pioneer, social media innovator, and author of "Smart Mobs. Nishant Shah is chair of 'Whose Change Is It Anyway? Futures, Youth, Technology And Citizen Action In The Global South (And The Rest Of The World)' track at DML2013. Here, he talks about shifts in citizen engagement in Indian politics and civics, and the underlying significance of these changes.

"More and more, you have young people who are trying to come together, not merely to express discontent, but actually take action so that they can build the kinds of futures they want to occupy."

The 2013 DML conference will be held in March 14-16, 2013 in Chicago, Illinois. The conference is supported by the MacArthur Foundation and organized by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub located at the University of California's systemwide Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine.

More details about the DML2013 Conference and the Call For Workshop/Panel/Paper Proposals can be found at the conference website: dml2013.dmlhub.net.

Video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/nishant-shah-whose-change-is-it-anyway

The Rules of Engagement

nishant — 2015-04-24T11:48:54Z

Why the have-nots of the digital world can sometimes be mistaken as trolls. I am not sure if you have noticed, but lately, the people populating our social networks have started to be more diverse than before.

Nishant Shah's column was published in the Indian Express on October 29, 2012.

Oh, sure, we are still talking about a fairly middle-class hang-out that happens largely in English and is restricted to people in urban environments who have the economic and cultural capital of access. But if you browse through your friends’ lists and compare it with, say, the network from five years ago, you will realise that the age demography has changed quite dramatically. I am not suggesting that the Web was only the realm of the young – let us face it, the people who actually created the infrastructure of the Web were not tiny tots. However, with Web 2.0 at the turn of the millennium, we have had an extraordinary focus on young people online.

But as the networks grow to include more people, there are now a lot of people online, who might not be the 16-year-old BlackBerry-wielding digital native, nor be in the “business of internet” but are finding a space for themselves, tentatively and steadily negotiating with this new space. Some of it might be because, those of us who were new kids on the block in the Nineties, are now older by a decade and are still on the block, but replaced by newer kids around the block. Some of it might be because there is an ease of access as portable computing devices grow more personal and get more people to use their smartphones as a gateway into the online worlds. But a lot of it is actually because the fold of the Web is expanding. The digital spaces of conversation are being integrated into our everyday lives and practices, replacing older forms of media and information structures and processes of social and cultural belonging.

And so, even though the penetration of the interwebz is not as rapid in countries like India as one would have hoped for, we do see a wide age group of people coming online, forming networks, and entering into conversations. I hadn’t really realised this, even though I was adding them to my social networks, that the digital immigrants are now here, and they are here to stay. It suddenly surfaced in my thoughts, because I recently heard a few narratives which made me dwell on the effort and the learning that one takes for granted but is a prerequisite for belonging to these new social spaces.

One of the first complaints I heard was about a hostility that many digital immigrants face when they start engaging with the social media. They follow the manuals. They read the FAQs. They look at patterns, and learn. And yet, even when they seem to be doing what seems to be exactly what everybody else is doing, they are often told that they got it all wrong. This is bewildering for many, because they cannot really see the difference. And the reason is that the social web is governed by a whole lot of unwritten rules and codes, which clearly are the rites of passage into the online world. These are not things that can be taught. These are not written in a guideline that tells you how to behave on Facebook or how to sift through the live-streams on Twitter. It is a fiercely guarded set of dos and don’ts which clearly distinguish between the digital natives and the digital immigrants, reinforcing exclusivity and exclusion. And when the digital immigrant violates these rules, they are often faced with a sneer, a sarcastic comment, or a dismissal as “not with it”.

The second thing I have repeatedly noticed is “calling troll” to people who do not always know these rules. Trolling is not new to the world of the internet. People who disrupt conversations and discussions by posting provocative or tangential information, by voicing hateful opinions, by passing harsh judgments, or sometimes by willfully breaking the rules of the communities, in order to seek attention and interrupt the flow of conversations are called trolls. Trolls are universally frowned upon and trolling wars often take up epic proportions because people get emotionally invested in them. Trolls are often shamed publicly, their mistakes brought into an embarrassing spot-light and ridiculed in back-channels or even in public discussions.

Calling somebody a troll presumes that the user is conversant with the rules of the game and is then breaking them, working with the idea that if you are online, you are naturally a digital native. The digital immigrants often create noob mistakes that can appear troll-like but are not intended to be so, and are often on the receiving end of a community’s hostility. And it is time, now that our online networks are growing, for us to realise that our presumptions about who is online need to change. If we are looking at an inclusive Web, we need to stop imagining that the person on the other side of the interface is necessarily like us, and develop new networks of nurture, which allows the digital immigrants safe spaces to experiment, make mistakes, and learn like the best of us. The next time, before you call somebody a troll, see if it might just be somebody learning the tricks of the trade. If they are doing something wrong, just politely point it out to them. And remember, acceptance is not only for people who are like us, but about people who are markedly unlike us.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/india-express-news-nishant-shah-oct-29-2012-the-rules-of-engagement

One. Zero.

nishant — 2015-04-24T11:50:32Z

The digital world is the world of twos. All our complex interactions, emotional negotiations, business transactions, social communication and political subscriptions online can be reduced to a string of 1s and 0s, as machines create the networks for the human beings to speak. So sophisticated is this network of digital infrastructure that we forget how our languages of connection are constantly being transcribed in binary code, allowing for the information to be transmitted across the web.

Nishant Shah's article was published in the Indian Express on September 16, 2012

Indeed, we have already reached a point where we don’t even need to be familiar with code to perform intimate functions with the machines that we live with, as they respond to us in human languages. While this human-machine duality has been resolved with the presence of intuitive and interactive interfaces that allow us to seamlessly connect to the person(s) at the other end of a digital connection, there is another binary that still remains at the centre of much discussion around all things digital.

This is the duality of the Real and the Virtual. In geekspeak, this particular separation has been coded as a divide between RL (Real Life) and VR (Virtual Reality). This separation between the two is so naturalised that it has become a part of our everyday imagination where things that happen online are ‘out there’ and ‘an escape’ whereas things that are offline, are ‘real’ and ‘believable’. However, as digital technologies become pervasive and ubiquitous, these lines between RL and VR have blurred. Especially with new technologies of augmented reality and simulated layers like Google Goggles or even location-based services on your smartphone that help you navigate through the offline world, it is becoming difficult to clearly say what is online and what is offline.

There are two questions that help demonstrate this blurring of boundaries very clearly. The first is an existential one, something that doesn’t crop up often in conversations, but suddenly haunts you on at 2 pm on an idle Thursday: Who are you, when you are online? A famous cartoon on the web had two dogs sitting on a connected computer, their paws on the mouse, and telling each other, ‘On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog’. But in the hyper-connected world that we live in, everybody knows exactly who we are, even as we ourselves are confused about where our bodies end and where our digital extensions and avatars begin. Things that we do in RL affect and shape the ways in which our avatars evolve on social networking sites. The interactions that our avatars have with other digital objects map back on our understanding of who we are and how we dress our bodies. Even when we are not connected, our avatars interact, constantly, not only with other avatars in the system, but also machines and artificial intelligence scripts, and robots and networks, masquerading as ourselves even outside our knowledge. We might be tagged, liked, shared, transmitted and morphed; we might be photoshopped, reduced to a tweet, condensed to a status message, embodied in an avatar on our favourite role playing game, or hovering as a signature to emails. These are all parts of us, but they are not just extensions of us. These are things that not only stand in for us but also shape the ways in which we understand ourselves and how we connect to the world.

The second question crops up regularly in digitally mediated conversations. When your parents call you on the cell phone, or your friend messages you on the Blackberry, or your colleague pings you on Skype or your IRC buddies see you on a chat channel. As our modes of access have become mobile and devices of access have become portable, we can never really clearly answer the question, ‘Where are you right now?’. It is a question worth dwelling on. Where are you when you are walking down a street, using GPRS data on your cellphone, and a friend uses a Voice Over IP service like Whatsapp to ask you, ‘Where are you right now?’. Are you on the street? On your phone? On an application? Located somewhere on a server? Bits of data on a high-speed optic fibre, zooming across the ionosphere? Depending upon who is asking the question, you would be able to and in fact have to give a different answer about where you are when you are online.

This blurred duality might be seen as confusing, taking away the assurance of our body and our geography from everyday practices. In fact, one of the reasons why the digital revolution has been so well received is because these technologies facilitate an almost seamless transfer of ideas, emotions and connections across the different realms of RL and VR, offering us new ways of thinking about being human, being social, and being connected. The strength of the digital is in this coupling together, of the hitherto irreconcilable realms of our life in messy and enchanting ways, giving us new opportunities to think about who we are and where we are in our quotidian lives.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/www-indianexpress-com-one-zero

Deconstructing Digital Natives: Young People, Technology and the New Literacies

nishant — 2015-04-24T11:51:06Z

Nishant Shah was invited to do a book review of a new anthology 'Deconstructing Digital Natives', edited by Michael Thomas. The review was published in Routledge's Journal of Children and Media on July 18, 2012.

Deconstructing Digital Natives: Young People, Technology and the New Literacies is an anthology that revisits the debates and scholarship that have arisen around youth and technology in the last decade or so. It is a timely intervention that invites some of the most influential scholars who have contributed to and shaped the discourse around “digital natives” to come and revisit their original ideas from the last decade. The term “digital native” probably bears witness to the strident discourses that, more often than not, fall into the trap of exotically glorifying or despairingly vilifying young peoples’ engagement with digital technologies. As Buckingham points out in his foreword to the book, these conversations either take up the language of a “generation gap [that] entails a narrative of transformation and even of rupture, in which fundamental continuities between the past and the future have been destroyed” or they guise themselves in an “almost utopian view of technology—a fabulous story about technology liberating and empowering young people, enabling them to become global citizens, and to learn and communicate and create in free and unfettered ways” (p. ix). The essays seek a point of departure from these tried and tested arguments in order to provide a “balanced view” on the topic. And so we have a distinguished author list from the world of digital natives scholarship, coming together not only to ponder on their own contributions to the field and how those ideas need to be upgraded, but also to provide new contexts, concepts, and frameworks to understand who, or indeed, what, is a “digital native,” often in tension with their earlier work.

In its ambition of revisiting existing debates and providing a “research-based approach by presenting empirical evidence and argument from international researchers in the field,” the book succeeds unevenly (p. xi). Despite its efforts to chart a point of departure, some of the essays end up falling into some usual traps. For example, despite the fact that the oldest digital natives are probably in their thirties, they are thought of as being young. They are defined only as “students” within formal learning institutions without looking at the radical potential of learning outside organized education, embedded in their everyday practices. The digital natives remain an object of research and the peer-to-peer structures that are supposed to shape them, but do not feature in the methodologies of researching them. This notwithstanding, the essays still offer a historical and social perspective on the debates around digital natives in certain developed pockets of the world.

In the first section, “Reflecting on the Myth,” Thomas’ essay “Technology, Education and the Discourse of the Digital Native” introduces a tension between the techno-euphorists and the “digital luddites,” which replays itself through the rest of the contributions. While Thomas places himself between “technoevangelism” and “technoskepticism,” Prensky, who coined the term “Digital Natives” in 2001, then introduces to us a new binary of “digitally wise” and “digitally dumb” (p. 4). Prensky reviews the responses that his opposition of “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” have produced over the last decade and emphasizes that his coinage was at the level of a metaphor, and was not to be taken seriously. Prensky agrees that the earlier opposition might be discarded because it evokes too many simple responses based on skills with technology. Digital wisdom, for Prensky, is in the ways in which digital technologies enhance the human brain “to anticipate second- and third-order effects to which the unaided mind may be blind” as the world becomes too complex for the “unenhanced human brain” to cope with it (p. 23). Typically, Prensky’s argument creates a dichotomy of those who can (and will) and those who will be outside of this web of digital enhancements. His analysis tries to complicate the idea of human wisdom by looking at questions of ethics and agency, but the final formulations appear cliche´d, merely re-creating the older tensions rather than thinking through them. Jones’ following essay on the “Net Generation” is more persuasive, where he argues for dismissing the idea that “nature of certain technologies . . . has affected the outlook of an entire age cohort in advanced economies” and instead should unpack how “new technologies emerging with this generation have particular characteristics that afford certain types of social engagement” (p.42).

In the second section, titled “Perspectives,” the essays take up two different tones.The first is about looking at digital literacy, skill, and fluency in everyday practices of digital natives, and how they shape our contemporary and future sociopolitical and cultural landscapes. Banaji, in exploring the EU Civic Web Project, echoes Jones’ ideas. The presumptions within education about an entire generation as “born with technologies” has consequences in the field of civic action, where programs for citizen action are designed with expectations that the young people will have core digital competencies and literacy. She does not push that argument further, but in her study of the two Scottish e-initiatives, one can see the promise of a radical reconstruction of civic engagement movements, where the young participants are not going to be satisfied as mere participators, and will demand a space for their voice to be heard.

Takahashi’s essay on the oyaubibunka (“thumb culture”) mobile generations in Japan stands alone in its analysis of an Asian context—though many might argue that Japan, with its developed economy, can hardly be counted as a typically “Asian” perspective. Takahashi is rooted, both in practice and discourse, in youth and technology in Japan, where the youth often experience close-knit community experiences through mobile interfaces, in their otherwise alienated modern habitats. Almost as a response to Turkle’s Alone Together (2011), Takahashi shows how collaborative and cocreation cultures ranging from the mobile novels on Mixi to everyday interaction on Social Networking Systems is bringing in new kinds of social spaces of belonging. The essay, however, resists simply celebrating this space and works in complex ideas of freedom, control, risks, and the tensions between traditionalization and modernity in Japan.

Zimic and Dalin, writing from a similar heavily connected Nordic region, pose a different set of questions in their essay, “Actual and Perceived Online Participation Among Young People in Sweden.” For Zimic and Dalin, in a space where connectivity can be taken for granted, the further question to ask is not whether digital natives participate online or not, but whether they participate in ways that are expected of “a digital citizen in the information age” (p. 137). Through empirical data and case studies, the essay shows the different kinds of activities that youth engage with and also concludes that though engaging in civic issues is important to the young people’s sense of belonging to participatory cultures, using the Internet does not provide an “automatic guarantee” toward participation, and “assistance is required in order to engage them in relevant activities” (p. 148).

The second set of essays in this section all cluster around the digital native as a student. Locating the digital native within educational institutions, they look at the ways in which the ideas of learning, pedagogy and engagement with the text are changing with the rise of digital technologies. Levy and Michael look at two case studies involving students in Australian high schools, to “facilitate a deeper understanding of products and processes in multimodal text construction,” which they think is core to interactive communication technology literacy skills (p. 85). The data is rigorous and rich, but the conclusions are a bit of a disappointment: digital natives need to better manage their time and resources and they need to learn traditional skills in order to cope with their educational environment.

The trend of an exciting hypothesis and conclusion, which do not necessarily leave you with anything more than what you already knew, continues in this section. Erstad sets out on a journey to see how digital literacy posits challenges to educating the digital generation and ends by suggesting that the digital divide should address questions of “how to navigate in the information jungle on the Internet, to create, to communicate, and so forth” (p. 114). Similarly, Kennedy and Judd want to unravel the mystery of why “students, who are so clearly familiar and apparently adept with Internet tools, are at times so poor at using the Internet academically” (p. 119). Through empirical research and interaction with students, they end up making an argument against the Googlization of everything (Vaidhyanathan, 2011), suggesting that “satisficing strategies” of information search, defined by a need for instant gratification and not looking beyond the first information sets, has produced “a generation of students that has grown up with Google [who] may over-value expediency when locating and selecting appropriate scholarly information” (p. 132). On similar trends, Levy proposes to question the assumption of whether all “young children are inherently ‘native’ users of digital technology” for implications on our future pedagogy within the new textual landscape (p. 152). The case studies and the frameworks built are interesting, but they reveal nothing more than the claim that the essay begins with by Marsh et al. (2005) and Bearne et al. (2007) that “young children are immersed in ‘digital practices’ from an early age and that they often develop skills in handling screen texts even when they are not exposed directly to computers at their own homes” (Levy, 2011, p. 163). The implication is clear: change our schools to accommodate for these new textual practices and help children capitalize on their digital competence and develop “digital wisdom.” But it is a recommendation that has been around for at least a decade, if not more.

The third and concluding section of the book, “Beyond Digital Natives,” is possibly the most promising part of the book. Bennett and Maton seek to look beyond “nuanced versions of the idea” and move the debate on to firmer grounds of how the rise of the digital natives is going to affect the policies around educational technology” (p. 169). They engage with a body of work that is specifically oriented toward building empirical evidence-based frameworks for understanding the potential role of technology in education. With a fine conceptual tool that makes distinctions between access and usage, they systemically dismiss the “academic moral panic” that characterizes conversations around youth-technology-change.

For Bennett and Maton, the object of inquiry is not the digital native but the body of discourse that surrounds this particular entity—and they make a plea for research rather than imaginings, showing how the influential work in the area has been plagued by unsupported claims, unevidenced observations, and futuristic imaginations, which paint a poetic picture of digital natives but offer very little in terms of furthering the argument. It is also noteworthy that they do not flinch from critiquing the colleagues who also feature in the same book, as an idealizing and homogenizing group that has shown “diversity rather than conformity” (p. 181).

Palfrey and Gasser, whose Born Digital (2008) has been the guide for lay readers to understand the nuances and complexities of the area, in their essay, begin by acknowledging that “digital natives” is an awkward term. However, they argue, it is still a term that resonates deeply with parents and educators, and that this resonance should not be taken lightly by researchers. Their decision was to use this term, albeit with caution and discretion, strategically to refer to a small subset of young people and the gamut of relationships and engagements they have with digital technologies. The suggestion is to use the term and in every usage, look at the unevennesses and awkwardness it creates, thus actually unpacking an otherwise opaque relationship which is reduced to “usage” or “access.” Their concerns are more about the quality of information and access, infrastructure for critical literacy and digital fluency, and making legible these everyday practices to larger implications for a future that they posit is bright and hopeful.

Deconstructing Digital Natives is an interesting revisit of a term that has grown in different ways through the first decade of the new millennium. However, the book still remains located in the same geopolitics in which the early discourse of digital natives were grounded—developed, privileged locations where connectivity, affordability, and ubiquitous digital literacy are taken for granted—reminiscent of the frantic cries one hears in piracy markets in Bangkok, “same, same, but different.” The revisiting does not seem to feel the need to explore other contexts. A few essays talk about factoring in local and contextual information in understanding digital natives, but the scholarship reinforces the idea of how technologies shape and are shaped by identities in some parts of the world, and that these identities can be heralded as universally viable, with a little nuancing.

The questions that have emerged in this discourse in the recent years, remain ignored. What does a digital native look like in the Global South? Can we have new concepts and frameworks which emerge from these contexts? Is it possible to produce accounts in languages and ideas that are embedded in everyday practices rather than forcing them to become legible in existing vocabularies? One would hope that the next book that deconstructs digital natives would also deconstruct the prejudices, presumptions, and methodological processes that are embedded in this field.

References

Bearne, E., Clark, C., Johnson, A., Manford, P., Motteram, M., & Wolsencroft, H. (2007). Reading on screen. Leicester: UKLA.
Marsh, J., Brookes, G., Hughes, J., Ritchie, L, Roberts, S., & Wright, K. (2005). Digital beginnings: Young children’s use of popular culture, media and new technologies. Sheffield: Literacy Research Centre, University of Sheffield.
Palfrey, J., & Gasser, U. (2008). Born digital. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Turkle, S. (2011). Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other, NY. New York: Basic Books.
Vaidhyanthan, S. (2011). The Googlization of everything: (And why we should worry). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Nishant Shah is the Director-Research at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society. He is the principal researcher for a Global South inquiry into digital natives and sociopolitical change, and recently edited four-volume book, Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?, which is available as a free download at http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook. Correspondence to: Nishant Shah, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India. E-mail: nishant@cis-india.org

Download the file (originally published by Taylor & Francis) here [PDF, 66 Kb]

Read the original published by Taylor & Francis here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/young-people-technology-new-literacies