Media Coverage & Book Reviews

Nishant Shah: “We will develop new textual and visual practices to facilitate the transfer of knowledge worldwide”

praskrishna — 2014-03-06T12:05:45Z

Today we are starting with a new format for the blog of the Hybrid Publishing Lab. There will be an interview series with our International Tandem Partners giving an insight on their current work, interest and cooperation with HP.

Read Dr. Shah's interview by Julia Rehfeldt published on the website of Hybrid Publishing Lab

First up is our Tandem Partner Dr. Nishant Shah, Research Associate at Common Media Lab and Hybrid Publishing Lab. He is the co-founder and Director-Research at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India.

Julia Rehfeldt: Dr. Shah, can you introduce yourself briefly und tell us what you are currently concerned with in your research?

Dr. Nishant Shah: This is a question that has always flummoxed me. I have spent all of the last decade trying to figure out how to explain what I do and what my research concerns are and I never have one straightforward answer to give.

The easiest way to answer this would be to say that I wear many hats. I am deeply interested in looking at how the digital shift is changing the way in which we see the world around us. And so my work spans several sectors, disciplines and intersections, trying to look at the mechanics and logics, logistics and structures of the world that we live in.

At the Hybrid Publishing Lab, as an International Tandem Partner, I look at the knowledge infrastructures of the digital times. I learn from the research and practice of my colleagues to explore the future of academic publishing, and I try to critically think through questions of Intellectual Property, Open Access movements, and concerns of Digital Humanities in the global knowledge circuits. Apart from that, I like to translate my research and knowledge for different stakeholders, to work with practitioners, policy makers, artists, technologists, hackers, legal scholars and development actors at the intersection of Internet and Society. As the Director – Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, I have been trying to develop South-based global networks that examine the conditions of being human, being social, and being political in emerging network societies. I also enjoy exploring new forms and content of pedagogy for students in and out of the classrooms, to develop new conditions of learning through and with digital media and cultures.

Rehfeldt: What was the most significant change, talk or lecture you experienced in 2013 that had an impact on the rights of open access or on your personal insights on that matter?

Dr. Shah: I think, on a very personal and a professional level, the death of Aaron Swartz and the horrific face of Intellectual Property tyrannies that surround the academic publishing which ironically focuses on questions of human liberty, values, equity and access, has had the most dramatic impact on me. Aaron Swartz committed suicide just over a year ago, and the conditions of his persecution, on the behalf of the American legal system, the intellectual property conglomerates and a globally reputed university that claims to build better futures for our digital worlds, has shocked most of us.

While playing the blame-game is redundant now – it is not going to bring back a young man who only believed in dreams of utopic sharing and commons – it is important to remind us that these battles of information and intellectual property are not for niche circles. We are increasingly living in worlds where more and more of our everyday life is being mediated, mitigated and measured in big data and quantified services.

We don’t only live in information age, but we also live through information, constantly producing data. And the technologies we use, the applications we live with, the platforms we live on, the social networks that we belong to, all take our information and data and copyright it so that we have almost no rights over it. This problem becomes only more amplified in the traditional academic knowledge industries where publicly funded research and practice gets hidden behind paywalls so that it remains in niche circles of access to those with privilege. We are reaching a stage where not only our formal knowledge but even our thoughts, desires and memories are quickly being contained in forms and formats that are no longer accessible to us.

2013 has shown that the more we lose control of our data, the more we lose battles of access to our collective knowledge, the more we concede our rights to information, which is the de facto currency of our times, the more we are going to be at the service of private and governmental conglomerates that shall control and contain the possibilities of radical transformation and change in our future.

Rehfeldt: You are currently involved in setting up a ‘Making Change’ project based on your paper ‘Whose change is it, anyway?’ published April 2013. Can you tell us what prompted your reflections in that paper, and what you seek to achieve with the project?

Dr. Shah: The ‘Making Change‘ project is an example of the multi-stakeholder, multi-disciplinary, knowledge methods and production that I am interested in. It is shaped by the framework proposed in the ‘Whose Change is it anyway?’ concept paper that proposes that in order to look at the change processes around us, we need to change the ways in which forms, formats, conditions, structures, processes, and life-cycles of knowledge practices need to be re-examined. The project aims to build conceptual frameworks by engaging different change actors in digital storytelling to understand how we analyse and examine the radical processes of change in the times to come.

Making Change is a knowledge exploration through which we seek to unpack the form, function, and practice of social and political change in emerging network societies. With this project, we will map existing traditional and innovative change practices through new knowledge methods and propose hybrid ways of building a knowledge commons that helps consolidate, curate and disseminate these new insights for change actors.

Hence, we will create a Knowledge Commons. The Knowledge Commons is a mash-up of resources, which we will set in motion through four distinct processes of getting insight into the mechanics, logistics, and catalysts of social and political change:

1. In this project, we will use new methods of collaborative knowledge production methods that bring in different knowledge stakeholders and actors to reflect upon and consolidate their existing projects.

2. We will develop new textual and visual practices to facilitate the transfer of knowledge worldwide.

3. We will work with existing knowledge communities – academia, policy, and practice – to build pedagogic resources for training knowledge visionaries about the future of change.

4. We will produce, curate and disseminate knowledge prototypes through storytelling to debate, question and re-energize discussions on important keywords and concepts in the change narratives.

The core of the Knowledge Commons will consist of new narratives and prototypes of how these narratives might help other approaches for social and political change. We shall further organize these narratives to train and help social change actors to develop better strategies of working within digital and network societies. The Knowledge Commons seeks to generate cross-fertilization between different networks of knowledge actors to generate critical insights to gain access, exchange and contribute to knowledge dialogues.

The Knowledge Commons is not just an online platform, but is built up through a combination of knowledge generating workshops (production sprints) as well as reflections, which are curated through online dialogues and critique. The production sprints invite the key change actors from our networks to incite conversations inspired by the thought piece ‘Whose Change is it Anyway?’. The conversations will be further annotated by the ‘Making Change’ white paper which offers more complex and nuanced ways of looking at the contexts, catalyst and processes of change embedded in particular movements.

Rehfeldt: There has been a lot of talk about ‘Twitter revolutions’ and ‘Blackberry riots’ – what would you say do digital technologies contribute to contemporary social movements and political action in the public sphere more generally?

Dr. Shah: I have spent some time trying to do away with the binaries and polarised responses that phrases like ‘Twitter Revolutions’ and ‘Blackberry Riots’ produce. They seem to bring pre-defined responses – they either suggest that the emergence of new digital technologies and applications, by their very presence, are producing radical change practices. They deny the historical conditions, the political contexts, the social and cultural practices of the region, and the structures of inequity and injustice that are often characteristic to particularly geographies and cultures. They refuse to understand that the digital does not merely produce things new – instead, it helps extend the existing movements of social and political change and are a part of a much larger paradigm shift. They alienate existing human endeavours of change and create false dichotomies like the old and new activisms, or traditional and digital movements.

I think it is better to understand that the digital produces ruptures and interruptions in the narrative of change; but the digital also has historical continuities which need to be better embedded in the geographical and political contexts of change. At the end of the day, we need to debunk the idea that digital activism around the globe is the same. Just because everybody uses Twitter to orchestrate people’s movements in different countries, it doesn’t mean that they are doing the same thing or in the same way. We need to do away with the homogenizing rhetoric of the digital that presumes that digital cultures are universal, and learn to look at the intersections of life that inform and are shaped by the emergence of the digital technologies.

Rehfeldt: To finish up, is there an interesting online article, or video you have read or seen lately which you could suggest to our readers?

Dr. Shah: I think one of the most interesting collections around digital and new activism last year was the anthology edited by Kees Biekart: Development and Change – Special Issue: FORUM 2013

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/nishant-shah-we-will-develop-new-textual-and-visual-practices-to-facilitate-the-transfer-of-knowledge-worldwide

Whose Change is it Anyway?

praskrishna — 2013-06-05T08:40:17Z

The first product from the Whose Change is it Anyway? Hague workshop with Hivos in February is out. The video captures the process of knowledge generation there.

Videos

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/whose-change-is-it-anyway

A lifetime of five years on the internet

praskrishna — 2013-05-20T09:04:28Z

Centre for Internet and Society observes its fifth anniversary on Sunday.

The article by Subir Ghosh was published in DNA on May 19, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted in this.

Five years is a long time in the internet space. The past five years, certainly, has been. And so has it been for the Centre for Internet and Society that completes five years here.

When a group of citizens got together to come under a platform called CIS five years ago, they had wanted to work on policy issues about the internet that had a bearing on society. They, in fact, still do; except that the new media space itself has undergone a metamorphosis. Five years ago social media was just starting off, few people had smart phones, and online speech was not a burning issue.

Sunil Abraham, executive director of city-based CIS, affirms this, and goes on to assert: “Five years ago, privacy was not a mainstream concern. Today, many different actors and stakeholders are interested in the configuration of the draft Privacy Bill. We first warned the public about the draconian measures in the IT Act during the 2008 amendment. Four years later, many more people are familiar with problematic sections and are adopting various strategies to amend the Act and it’s associated rules.”

Likewise, five years ago, people dismissed “shared spectrum” as a pipe dream; today “shared spectrum” is mentioned in the National Telecom Policy. CIS usually thinks ahead, and works on a range of issues.

“For internet adoption in India to grow dramatically from the dismal statistics today, we need to ensure continued access to cheap devices and affordable and ubiquitous broadband,” says Abraham.

“With Ericsson suing Micromax for Rs100 crore, the mobile wars have come to India. If we have to protect innovation in sub-100 dollar devices, we need to configure our patent and copyright policy carefully.”

But since CIS works primarily on policy issues, shouldn’t it have been based in Delhi rather than in Bangalore? “We do have a small office in Delhi. But we are headquartered in Bangalore because we need to keep learning from technologists and the technical community,” explains Abraham.

When an organisation calling itself the Centre for Internet and Society (www.cis-india.org) observes its fifth anniversary, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that many of the activities related to the anniversary celebrations (May 20-23) have precious little to do with the internet, and is more about society itself. And yes, an entire evening is devoted to Kannada. There’s a talk by Chandrashekhara Kambara on ‘Kannada in the modern era,’ and another by UB Pavanaja titled ‘From Palm Leaf to Tablet – Journey of Kannada’.

“We are looking at the complete eco-system. For instance, during the digitalisation of TV in India, what will happen to the internet? Do TV promoting policies undermine the growth of broadband? On the second day we look at the connection between another older technology - cinema and the Internet.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/dna-india-may-19-2013-subir-ghosh-a-lifetime-of-five-years-on-the-internet

CIS anniversary

praskrishna — 2013-05-06T07:28:07Z

The Centre for Internet and Society will celebrate five years of its existence with an exhibition showcasing its works and accomplishments.

This was published in Hindu Business Line on May 5, 2013

The exhibition will be held concurrently at both Bangalore and Delhi offices from May 20 to 24, 2013, said a press release.

“To promote transparency, we're getting the general public to be our auditors by throwing open our account books and contracts which show how we have spent the Rs 8.3 crore received from our donors.”

The exhibition will also see artists like Kiran Subbaiah, Tara Kelton, Navin Thomas, Abhishek Hazra, among others exhibiting their works, as well as lectures.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-business-line-may-5-2013-cis-anniversary

Video Vortex # 9 Re:assemblies of Video

praskrishna — 2013-03-04T03:44:56Z

Nishant Shah is a speaker at this event organized by the Institute of Network Cultures, Post Media Lab, Moving Image Lab, Leuphana, et.al. The event is being held at Luneberg from February 28, 2013 to March 2, 2013.

Click to see the program flyer. Also see Nishant's key note at Video Vortex

Participants

Thursday February 28th / Donnerstag 28.02.2013 VIDEO VORTEX #9 Re:assemblies of Video + Analog@VIDEO VORTEX

confirmed speakers / bestätigte Referenten: Beth Coleman» , Seth Keen» , Edwin» , Thomas Østbye» , Andreas Treske» , Stephanie Hough» , Martin Katić» , Theresa Steffens» , Arndt Potdevin» , Robert M. Ochshorn» , Nan Haifen» , Viola Sarnelli» , Boris Traue» , Achim Kredelbach» , Dalida María Benfield» , Renée Ridgway» , Gabriel S Moses» , Nishant Shah»

Friday March 1st / Freitag 01.03.2013 VIDEO VORTEX #9 Re:assemblies of Video

confirmed speakers / bestätigte Referenten: Margarita Tsomou» , Sascha Simons» , Nelli Kambouri» , Pavlos Hatzopoulos» , Joshua Neves» , Gabriel Menotti» , Filippo Spreafico» , Caroline Heron» , Jonathan Shaw» , Jan Gerber» , Sebastian Luetgert» , Elric Milon» , Sebastian Luetgert» , Sascha Kluger» , Jamie King» , Stefano Sabatini» , Peter Snowdon» , Miya Yoshida» , Boaz Levin» , Azin Feizabadi» , Kaya Behkalam» , Jens Maier-Rothe» , Jasmina Metwaly», Graswurzel.tv» , Björn Ahrend» , Timo Großpietsch»

Saturday March 2nd / Samstag 02.03.2013 VIDEO VORTEX #9 Re:assemblies of Video

confirmed speakers / bestätigte Referenten: Vito Campanelli» , Robert M. Ochshorn» , Alejo Duque» , Lucía Egaña Rojas» , Andrew Clay» , Stefan Heidenreich» & Deborah Ligorio» , Cornelia Sollfrank»

Digital Natives

For the videos DNI-IV, visual artist Renée Ridgway and filmmaker Rick van Amersfoort interviewed digital natives from all over the world around four issues, juxtapositioning images with spoken content. The following 4 clips were specially edited teasers of the Digital Natives videos for public transport in Lueneburg. From 4 February to 4 March they run on the screens in public busses (between central station and university campus).

Renée Ridgway will show her ’collaborative meme’ in full length as part of the Video Vortex program at 16:30 on 28 February and discuss her project together with respondents Dalida Maria Benfield and Nishant Shah.

The first video, DNI addresses the construction of the digital native (DN) with comments, critiques and opinions from the interviewees, visualizing a shift in how digital natives are imaged and perceived.

The second video DNII focuses on the real vs. the digital whereby the division between physical reality and virtual reality is dismissed to build more comprehensive accounts of digital native practices.

The third clip DNIII explores the processes that produce possibilities and potentials for social change through political participation and the role that technologies play in defining civic action and social movements. What are the relationships that these technology-based identities and practices have with existing political legacies?

The last video DNIV combines connectivity, collaboration, inspiration and transformation but also reflects upon the limits of cyberspace, its borders and the eventual co-optation of technology by users.

DNI, DNII, DNIII, DNIV were commissioned by Hivos, Amsterdam and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/video-vortex-9-net-re-assemblies-of-video

D:coding Digital Natives - Seminar with Nishant Shah

praskrishna — 2013-03-06T05:21:27Z

Nishant Shah gave a talk on D:coding Digital Natives at Samhällsvetarhuset on February 26, 2013, from 1.15 p.m. to 3.00 p.m. The event was organized by HUMlab.

Read the original published by HUMlab.

Abstract

The discourse around youth-technology-change - digital natives, if you will - has been shaped by self explanatory buzzwords like participation, collaboration, mobilization etc. These words seem to hold a promise of revolutions and change without actually acknowledging material practices or complex relationships that young people have with technologies and visions of change. Trying to decode these words through case-studies from the Global South, this talk hopes to offer new frameworks through which digital natives can be studied and understood in emerging ICT contexts.

Bio:
Nishant Shah is the co-founder and director of research at the Bangalore-based research organization Centre for Internet and Society. He studies questions of governance, identity, planning and body at the intersections of digital technologies, law and everyday cultural practice.

He is a visiting researcher at the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University, Germany, and an International Knowledge Partner on 'Youth, Technology and Change' with Hivos, Netherlands. He recently co-edited the four-volume book series "Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?" that captures discourse, practice and policy as it shapes and is shaped by youth driven, everyday practices of digital technologies and is currently working on looking at civic action in networked societies.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/humlab-umea-university-d-coding-digital-natives

What does it mean to be a digital native?

praskrishna — 2012-12-10T04:21:00Z

The war between natives and immigrants is ending. The natives have won.

Oliver Joy's blog post was published by CNN on December 8, 2012. Nishant Shah is quoted, criticising Marc Prensky's ideas of digital nativity as borne of privilege and first-world centricity.

It was a bloodless conflict fought not with bullets and spears, but with iPhones and floppy disks. Now the battle between the haves and have-nots can begin.

The post-millennial "digital native," a term coined by U.S. author Marc Prensky in 2001 is emerging as the globe's dominant demographic, while the "digital immigrant," becomes a relic of a previous time.

The digital native-immigrant concept describes the generational switchover where people are defined by the technological culture which they're familiar with.

Prensky defines digital natives as those born into an innate "new culture" while the digital immigrants are old-world settlers, who have lived in the analogue age and immigrated to the digital world.

Although not Luddites, the immigrants struggle more than natives to adapt to hi-tech progress.

The author of "Teaching Digital Natives," whose success pushed him onto the speaking circuit, says the explosion of technology over the last 10 years is just the start of a symbiotic new world. Computers and handsets are becoming an extension of body and mind, creating a Cyborg-like population.

Prensky cites the 100-meter runner Oscar Pistorius, an athlete with prosthetic legs, as an example of how technology is used to enhance our lives. He told CNN: "For humans, what used to be this body of flesh and bone, all that is now just the center... Being human is a moving target."

The human race and its struggle to keep up with technology

Prensky says that at no time in history has technology moved so fast. Today the latest high-tech gizmos can be passe even before hitting the shop floors.

In the past -- during the post-industrial revolution era, for example -- accelerating technology has plateaued. So, with the meteoric rise of new social media outlets including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Skype, history suggests the world is overdue for a slowdown.

But Prensky says this time, any slowdown in the digital age is a "myth," as innovation will only press forward "faster... And faster and faster."

He told CNN: "We are not going through a transition to another faze of stability, and that is the key point. People will always be behind now and that will be a stress they have to cope with."

The new norm

Connecting with one another in the modern world requires a knack for social networking and texting, which is the norm for the digital native. But for the immigrant, it can be akin to learning a whole new language.

Prensky illustrates his point with former director of the CIA David Petraeus. In November, he was embroiled in a scandal that revealed he had an affair with Paula Broadwell.

The FBI uncovered the affair while it investigated e-mails that Broadwell allegedly sent to a Petraeus family friend, Jill Kelley.

Prensky labels this naivety by immigrants as "digital stupidity" -- by assuming that when people decide to post online or send e-mails, they believe privacy is automatically applicable.

"People get frightened by change and they should be. They need courage to face the future these days, especially those who feel left behind." Prensky said. "People adapt instinctively and humans are very good at that. The young people live in the context; the older people see the changing context and struggle."

Digital poverty

As technology filters into every corner of the globe and tech cities spring up in some unlikely places from Bangalore to Tel Aviv, a new gulf is emerging to separate the digitally savvy from the disconnected: Poverty.

In India, over two-thirds of the population live on less than $2 a day, according to the World Bank. But a United Nations report still says that mobile phones are more common than toilets, with nearly half of India's 1.2 billion population armed with a handset.

Nishant Shah, a director at the Centre for Internet and Society in India, told CNN that defining natives and immigrants by generation is a "serious concern." According to Shah, Prensky's views were formed from the "privileged" position of living in the U.S.

Shah added: "[Prensky's] observations may describe a generation gap that the U.S. faced, but if you transplant the same definition to other parts of the world, natives are sometimes indistinguishable from immigrants."

The real fear for Shah is the new hierarchies created by digital literacy and the class systems that will be shaped by access to digital technologies.

The call of the developing world

As mobile networks extend their reach and areas become increasingly urbanized, Western tech companies are seeking to tap markets with large populations.

Last year, Finnish phone maker Nokia released a range of smart phones targeted at consumers in emerging markets, particularly in Asia, to compete with cheaper Android devices.

But Shah argues bombarding a country with technology and infrastructure is not a rounded solution to the digital poverty problem.

India, for example, has connectivity and access in abundance, but the country continues to suffer from a generation of "digitally poor classes." He argues that simply providing the equipment does not help young people understand how that technology can better their lives without education and training.

Shah told CNN: "Just because young people have tech access in India, it doesn't make them digital natives." He added, "It creates digital outcasts -- people whose supposed problem of access to the world has been resolved."

Prensky, however, believes a "networked planet" is a sign developing nations will soon close the digital divide. Even those who don't yet have the technology still know that it exists, and will have it before long.

The world in 2020

By 2020, Prensky predicts people across the globe will be plugged into the "AORTA," -- Always On RealTime Access -- a term coined by Mark Anderson, the chief of the Strategic News Service -- specializing in technology news. A future in which people are constantly able to access information and news from anywhere on the planet.

Shah says that the works of science fiction may offer the most accurate insight into our futuristic society.

He said: "The presents that we live in, are the futures that our pasts have imagined."

"Let us hope that the technologies of the future will also be designed to protect that which is sacred, and that which is important in our own understanding of being human."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/cnn-december-8-2012-oliver-joy-what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-digital-native

10th International ISTR Conference

praskrishna — 2012-08-05T08:03:28Z

The 10th international ISTR conference was organised by ISTR at Universita Degli Studi Di Siena in Italy from July 10 to 13, 2012. Nishant Shah gave a lecture on Beyond Normative Citizenships: Exploring the ‘New’ in Digital Activism.

Nishant Shah spoke as a panelist in the panel "Theoretical Grounding of Civic Driven Change".

This Tenth International Conference of ISTR marks the 20th anniversary of the formation of this global community of scholars and interested others dedicated to the creation, discussion, and advancement of knowledge pertaining to the Third Sector and its impact on human and planetary well-being and development internationally.

In this era of far-reaching changes in the way that societies are organized, the Third Sector is playing a critical role and has significantly gained importance in many countries. Democratization and the role of civil society in social integration and participation are in the spotlight with recent mobilizations particularly in the Middle East and ongoing suppression of civil society under authoritarian regimes in parts of the world. New media, social networks and other technological innovations raise new opportunities and challenges for organizing collective action and the diversity of civil society. Marketization and its impact on the Third Sector is attracting renewed research interest as welfare budgets are cut and the role of nonprofits is called into question in difficult fiscal times in many nations. A second type of marketization is also attracting attention particularly the growth of corporate social responsibility (CSR), the emergence of social enterprises and changing philanthropic paradigms. International research toward a better understanding of the implications of these changes continues to gather momentum.

ISTR’s Tenth International Conference in Sienna, Italy offers an excellent opportunity for further dialogue on these and other changes in an environment of rigor, reflexivity, authenticity and creativity. Siena encapsulates a mix of tradition and innovation that is woven from ancient webs of social engagement and enduring beliefs in justice through periods of peace and conflict. It provides an excellent setting to explore the role of third sector studies as an integrative science with short and long term objectives geared towards understanding and addressing societal concerns. Three exciting plenary sessions will canvas major theoretical and practice developments in the Third Sector and highlight the rich history and accomplishments of the host nation’s Third Sector.

See the event details on ISTR website
Read the program supplement for ISTR's 10th International Conference

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/istr-conference

Immigrants not Natives

Sally Wyatt — 2012-04-30T10:27:59Z

Sally Wyatt reviews the four-book collective, Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? edited by Nishant Shah & Fieke Jansen.

Review of Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? edited by Nishant Shah & Fieke Jansen, Bangalore: Centre for Internet and Society/The Hague: Hivos Knowledge Programme, 2011:

Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? (2011) is the product of a series of workshops held in 2010-11 in Taiwan, South Africa and Chile. The aim was to bring together a different cohort of ‘digital natives’ than that which had hitherto been assumed in the popular and academic literature, namely white, highly educated, (mostly) male elites largely to be found on and around US university campuses. The workshops brought together 80 people who identified themselves as ‘digital natives’ but with very different backgrounds, and who came from Asia, Africa and Latin America. The four booklets which have been produced on the themes of ‘To Be’, ‘To Think’, ‘To Act’ and ‘To Connect’ provide many fascinating and thought-provoking insights into the possibilities for reflection, action and interaction available to this group.

In my review, I focus on the editorial comments provided by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen in the Preface, the Introduction, and the sidebar text running alongside most of Book One, To Be, in which they provide the context for the workshops and the books, and in which they reflect on the concept of ‘digital native’. Shah and Jansen recognise many of the limits of the concept of ‘digital native’, and reflect upon those limits and possible alternatives. They and the contributors keep the term, while at the same time challenging it, refining it and reclaiming it. It is to this ongoing process of reflection and definition that I would like to contribute, and I do so by thinking about my own position as a user and an analyst of digital technologies and as a Canadian-born child of immigrants.

I was born in 1959 so there is no chance of me being mistaken for a ‘digital native’ (often defined as someone born after 1980). Yet I was programming when I was a student in the late 1970s, and I have lived in a house with a computer in it since 1984, though I didn’t acquire home internet access until 2002, relatively late for a person living in north-western Europe with my income and occupation. One feature of this life, not at all untypical for someone of my age and background, is that I experienced digital technology before it was black-boxed, when to operate a home computer required a certain level of engineering skill, and when the sleekness of today’s devices was still a dream. Maybe I am what the editors refer to (ironically and with affection they claim) as a ‘digital dinosaur’ (p.15). I would never claim to have been part of the cohort who created the internet, though maybe I am part of the group of social scientists who began analysing the social aspects of digital technologies, in both their production and their use, sooner rather than later.[1]

I’m also of a generation deeply affected by second-wave feminism. One of the most important books for us was The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, in which she wrote, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ (1949, p.267). This sentence, reproduced on countless posters, coffee mugs and t-shirts, neatly encapsulates the idea that gender is socially constructed, that there is nothing essential about the category of ‘woman’, nor of any other category. I would like to suggest that it also applies to digital natives – they are not born, they are made. Just because processes of socialisation are subtle and powerful, and one no longer has to poke the mother board with a paper clip to make the computer work, it does not mean that digital natives arrive fully formed as such in the world, nor that the identity will remain stable over time for them individually or as a group.

I read these volumes while in Canada in early 2012. I was born and grew up in Canada, though I have lived in Europe for all of my adult life. Canada and other settler societies use ‘native’ differently from Europeans. It was a term often used by colonisers to describe Indigenous communities such as the First Nations people in Canada, Aboriginal people in Australia, or the Māori in New Zealand. ‘Natives’ were not respected by the colonisers, and these groups continue to suffer disadvantage and discrimination. Moreover, the term ‘native’ is not used by Indigenous communities to describe themselves.

And because ‘native’ has different connotations, so does ‘immigrant’. I have lived for the past decade in the Netherlands, where to be an ‘immigrant’ is not comfortable, as attitudes and policies towards immigrants have become harsher, and the official definition of ‘native’ more exclusive. It is different in Canada, where the state of being an immigrant is almost the norm. Most people (except the First Nations people) are immigrants themselves, or have immigrants in their not too distant family histories. Canadians are comfortable with hybrid identities – there are not only French Canadians, but also Chinese Canadians, Greek Canadians and Chilean Canadians. I attended an international sporting event while visiting, and many of the spectators brought two flags with them to wave, depending on who was competing; or they had superimposed the maple leaf (the symbol of Canada that appears in the middle of the national flag) onto the flag of another country. There are many advantages to being an immigrant, apart from a wider choice of sporting heroes. One is that we know that identity is performance. Immigrants are constantly ‘becoming’ - legally, bureaucratically, linguistically and culturally.

Another advantage of being an immigrant comes from understanding the possibilities for re-invention. Many immigrants come for the promise of a better life for themselves and their children. It can be difficult and painful, but also exhilarating to start a new life, without the baggage of the past, whether one’s own youthful indiscretions or the burdens of expectation of the ‘old country’. I wonder whether ‘digital natives’ will ever experience the excitement of a new start. What will happen when they reach middle age, and the digital traces they have been creating since childhood cannot be erased and continue to follow them wherever they go? How will they cope when a younger generation arrives with a newer technology offering other possibilities for social transformation, because we can be certain that there will be newer technologies and that they will be accompanied by promises of social change?

It is too easy to assume that ‘native’ is a superior identity position to ‘immigrant’, or that natives always have advantages compared to immigrants because of their greater familiarity with the norms and codes of a way of life, digital or otherwise. In this volume, the project of reclaiming and expanding the reach of ‘digital native’ suggests that the editors and contributors see it as the preferred identity. Both ‘native’ and ‘immigrant’ are constructed categories, but ‘immigrant’ (from my particular historically located subject position) often feels like a more dynamic and reflexive identity position.

I will conclude by further performing my middle-aged curmudgeonly identity (and it is somewhat frightening how quickly one can slip into this as one passes 50). On many occasions in recent years, I have heard digital natives say – without shame – that they do not read anything that is not available online. Sometimes this is for understandable reasons, such as the cost and scarcity of printed versions, especially in countries where the workshops were held. But sometimes they seem genuinely unaware that many books and sources are not available digitally. One problem with only reading material that is born digital or has been digitised (sometimes badly) is that one becomes desensitised to grammatical niceties. Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen are the editors of these four volumes, and an executive editor is listed in the colophon. I am reluctant to criticise people who might not be native speakers of English, but there is at least one language mistake in almost every paragraph. The paper books of Digital (Alter)Natives with a Cause? are beautifully designed and produced. The production values of this project were high. It is unfortunate that more effort was not expended in language editing. Copy editors are in danger of suffering the same fate as the bison of the Great Plains, but this time not at the hands of settlers but at the hands and keyboards of digital natives.

[1].See Wyatt (2008) where I discuss at greater length the relationship between information society debates and feminist analyses of technology, and include elements of my personal relationship to those debates.

References

de Beauvoir, Simone (1949/1989). The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage Books.
Wyatt, Sally (2008) ‘Feminism, technology and the information society: Learning from the past, imagining the future’ Information, Communication & Society, 11,1: 111-30.

Sally Wyatt works with the eHumanities Group, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences/Maastricht University.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/media-coverage/immigrants-not-natives

Digital Natives and the Myth of the Revolution: Questioning the Radical Potential of Citizen Action

praskrishna — 2012-04-03T08:36:19Z

Nishant Shah made a presentation on 'Questioning the radical potential for citizen action' at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of South California on March 8, 2012.

The event was organised by the Annenberg Research Network in International Communication (ARNIC) and the Civic Paths research group.

This talk is a thought-in-progress inquiry into the radical claims and potentials of citizen action which has emerged in the last few years in several parts of the world. It seeks to show how citizen action is not necessarily a radical form of politics and that we need to make a distinction between Resistances and Revolutions. It locates Resistance as an endemic condition of governmentality within a State-Citizen-Market relationship and shows how it often strengthens the status-quo rather than radically undermining it. Looking at one particular instance of a campaign against corruption in India, to build a framework that can be deployed to understand the dissonance between the claims of the future and the practices of the present that gets produced in such instances of citizen action.

Nishant Shah is the co-founder and Director-Research at the Bangalore based research organisation Centre for Internet and Society. His interest is in questions of governance, identity, planning and body at the intersections of digital technologies, law and everyday cultural practice. He recently co-edited a 4 volume book titled 'Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?' that explores the relationships between youth-technology-change in emerging ICT contexts of the Global South.

Venue: University of South California
Date: March 8, 2012
Time: 4.00 p.m to 5.30 p.m.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/digital-natives-and-the-myth-of-revolution

5 Challenges for the Future of Learning: Digital Natives and How We Shall Teach Them

praskrishna — 2012-04-30T13:04:26Z

At the Digital Media and Learning Conference on beyond education technologies, Nishant Shah gave a ignite talk on 5 Challenges for the Future of Learning: Digital Natives and How We Shall Teach Them on March 1, 2012. There was an author's table where he presented and shared the Digital AlterNatives books and info-kits.

Thursday, March 1, 2012 – 4:30-5:45 (Cyril Magnin Ballroom)

Kea Anderson from SRI International
How do you know it's working?: The U.S. Dept. of Education's new Evidence Framework

Doug Belshaw, Purpos/ed
Why we need a debate about the purpose(s) of education

Tessa Joseph-Nicholas, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The Zombies and the Revolution: Making Science Fiction Matter in the Digital Culture Classroom

Peter Kittle, Cal State Univ., Chico
Good Memes, Bad Teaching

Crystle Martin, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Interest-Based Crap Detecting

David Cooper Moore, Temple University
What Did Rebecca Black's "Friday" Teach Us About Media Literacy?

Chad Sansing, Central Virginia Writing Project
I used to be a middle school teacher like you until I took an arrow in the knee

Rafi Santo, Indiana University
Why Kids Need to Know How to Hack: Technological Citizenship and the New Civic Education

Nishant Shah, Centre for Internet and Society
5 Challenges for the future of learning: Digital Natives and how we shall teach them

Saturday, March 3, 2012 – 3:30-4:30 (Cyril Magnin Ballroom)

Heather Braum, Northeast Kansas Library System
Learning from Birth to the Grave @ Your Library

Mel Chua, Purdue University, and Sebastian Dziallas, Olin College
Teaching Open Source: Productively Lost For Great Justice

Ben Chun, Galileo Academy of Science & Technology
Programming for Every Subject

Jane Crayton, UNM, CU Boulder, STEM-A
iSTEMart

Mizuko Ito, University of California, Irvine
Occupy Learning

Henry Jenkins, USC
The Samba School Revisited: Play, Performance, and Participation in Education

Chris Lawrence, Hive Learning Network, NYC
Throw a learning party!

Heather Mallak, Girls, Math & Science Partnership, Click! Spy School
Opening things with your teeth

Jesse Pickard, MindSnacks
How to Make Your Educational Game Not Suck

Philipp Schmidt, Peer 2 Peer University
How to make an online course in 5 minutes

Jeff Sturges, Mt Elliott Makerspace
Makerspaces

Hsing Wei, Eyebeam and New Visions
DTC Lab = teachers + technologists + designers = digital prototypes in 3 months

Venue: Wyndham Parc 55 Hotel, San Francisco, CA 94102

Click on the original here

Video

The video is also featured in YouTube

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/ignite-talks

Digital Natives and the Myth of the Revolution: Questioning the Radical Potential of Citizen Action

praskrishna — 2012-04-03T07:15:23Z

At UC Santa Cruz, on Monday, March 5, 2012, Nishant Shah gave a lecture on "Digital Natives and the Myth of the Revolution: Questioning the Radical Potential of Citizen Action". The lecture focused more on the India Against Corruption case-study rather than the theoretical framework to understanding revolutions.

This talk is a thought-in-progress inquiry into the radical claims and potentials of citizen action which has emerged in the last few years in several parts of the world. It seeks to show how citizen action is not necessarily a radical form of politics and that we need to make a distinction between Resistances and Revolutions. It locates Resistance as an endemic condition of governmentality within a State-Citizen-Market relationship and shows how it often strengthens the status-quo rather than radically undermining it. Looking at one particular instance of a campaign against corruption in India, Nishant is seeking to build a framework that can be deployed to understand the dissonance between the claims of the future and the practices of the present that gets produced in such instances of citizen action.

Follow the original on the UC Santa Cruz website
Also see this

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/questioning-the-radical-potential-of-citizen-action

An Experiment in Social Engineering: The Cultural Context of an Avatar

praskrishna — 2012-03-06T06:03:19Z

Pramod K. Nayar reviews Nilofar Shamim Ansher’s essay ‘Engineering a Cyber Twin’ (Digital Alternatives with a Cause? Book One: To Be).

‘Engineering a Cyber Twin’ is an attempt to inventory the ontological features of an avatar. Beginning with the assumption that representation of the self – which implies, at once, recognition of one’s self but also the publicly available narrative of the self – is controlled and controllable, Ansher moves on to representation online. What are the cues that enable viewers of avatars to recognize Ansher’s avatar? What are the parameters of evaluating avatar behaviour, as opposed to, say offline behaviour? Ansher here intervenes with a significant question: why do we always have to ‘read’ the avatar as divided from or compared with the self? Is it an ‘either/or’ equation between self and online avatar?

Examining her cybertwin on MyCybertwin.com, Ansher describes how she designed her avatar. The process included filling out a detailed questionnaire from which the avatar takes its shape, attitudes, values and determines its responses. Essentially, as Ansher discovers, the ‘cyber twin runs on scripts running in my head [sic]’. The personality type to which the twin belongs to must be chosen from a set of six types – which, as Ansher correctly points out, leaves little room for fluidity beyond what the programmer has designed. This also implies that Ansher’s self and the cyber twin function within severe constraints of personality and responses to the personality of the other. When Ansher communicates with the cyber twin the twin picks up keywords from Ansher’s script and conveys them back as its (her?) ‘response’, all suggesting a packaged response. This ensures that there are not too many permutations and combinations or ‘layers’ (Ansher’s term) to the cyber twin’s personality.

Ansher wonders what it would take for the twin to discover motivation, or human ‘sentiments’ such as love or care. Does the avatar really constitute a separate entity, or is it a severely limited extension of what Ansher has chosen from the questionnaire. Ansher has deeper metaphysical questions that connect archives (of information, including the questionnaire) with larger issues of an ethical nature. For example, Ansher notes that she can’t teach her twin ‘good’ and bad’ behaviour from just a questionnaire. Ansher concludes that the twin has not ‘earned the right’ to represent her as her online version.

This is a pithy essay that explores the exhilarations, excitements and tensions of online lives (such avatar lives quietly avoid the domain of messy body functions and fluids). Ansher is spot on in her evaluation of the cyber twin as a limited ‘identity’ where the code – the DNA, or the questionnaire – is itself based on a very short list of normative values and personality ‘types’. She is also correct to argue that the self in real life is not a set of stock responses even if these responses are what have been socialized into us. The self evolves, alters, shifts and these are not always programmable or predictable. Ansher rightly does not go so far as to explore sentience in computers and programming (the stuff of sci-fi), but is concerned with the dynamics of interaction between a sentient creature (her real self) and the avatar.

The ‘engineering’ in Ansher’s title must take on an ironic tone: the avatar is an experiment in social engineering as well where the norms of self-making and meaning-making are cultural and engineering an avatar with stock responses (to which then Ansher responds in the chat) with predilections, preferences and prejudices constitutes a kind of cultural work. When for instance Ansher writes: ‘she [the avatar] doesn’t add layers to her identity so much as reinforce the various traits that go into defining it’ she has isolated the key issue here: the cultural work that produces avatars and online iconography with specific traits are trapped within and limited by the contexts in which real selves grow. Both partake of each other: the cultural work produces the Ansher-self and this Ansher-self produces her avatar. The difference of course is that the Ansher-self is not fixed, is complicated and defiantly unpredictable.

This is an important essay that sidesteps the risks of both hagiography (of digital worlds) and the panic Luddite reactions (not responses, but reactions) to the ‘other’ world. I would have liked a bit more – to be fair, this might be entirely due to the space constraints in the volume – on the eversion of the digital world that we now see: where the digital, the cyber- or the ‘other’ world is not just out there but around us, in us, since we occupy, almost simultaneously, the offline and online today. So, to answer the question raised in the first paragraph, one does not see the cybertwin in terms of an ‘either/or’ with the self. It is simultaneously the radically different other and the extension of the self. The self itself is a series of posturings, role-playings and performances. The online avatar is also one more of these. The presentation of the self in everyday life, to adapt the title of Goffman’s pioneering work, now includes status messages, scraps, posts, tweets and avatars. The narrative of the self is now inclusive of the sometimes fictional narratives put online by the self. Profile and impression management is also about how one dresses online.

It would also be interesting to examine the various clusters of avatars in such services as MyCybertwin.com or Second Life, to develop a taxonomy of avatars. If, as suggested above, it is cultural work that carries over into designing avatars then such a taxonomy might say something about the societies and structures from which such avatars emerge.

Ansher’s essay draws attention to the complicated ontology of the avatar but also reflects, with considerable intensity, on the dynamic relation of online and offline selves. Thus she eschews a simplistic binary of offline/online, preferring to focus on the domain of interaction between the two ‘personae’ of the same self.

Pramod K. Nayar

Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India. His recent publications include Writing Wrongs: The Cultural Construction of Human Rights in India (Routledge 2012), States of Sentiment: Exploring the Cultures of Emotion (Orient BlackSwan 2011), An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures (Wiley-Blackwell 2010), Postcolonialism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum 2010), Packaging Life: Cultures of the Everyday (Sage 2009), Seeing Stars: Spectacle, Society and Celebrity Culture (Sage 2009) among others. His forthcoming books include Digital Cool: Life in the Age of New Media (Orient BlackSwan) and Colonial Voices: The Discourses of Empire (Wiley-Blackwell).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/media-coverage/an-experiment-in-social-engineering

How to Put Up a Facebook Resistance

Oliver Leistert — 2012-02-21T08:47:15Z

Review of Marc Stumpel’s essay, "Mapping the Politics of Web 2.0: Facebook Resistance", in Digital Alternatives with a Cause Book 2: To Think, pp.24-31 by Oliver Leistert.

Facebook is right now in a peculiar situation: the planned IPO bears a lot of risks and puts pressure on the Western market leader of Social Networking Sites. The current discussion about Facebook's timeline is only the tip of the iceberg, a symptom of a larger conflict that lurks behind it: how much direct marketing are Facebook users willing to take? How many drastic top-down changes of the user's Facebook experience are possible unless they understand that their presence on this site and what they do there is in tension with the company's goals that provides this digital environment?

Stumpel addresses Facebook as a communication instance that is subordinated by power lines. He refers to Manuel Castell's notion of power in the network society. This characterization then is expanded to the concept of protocological control as outlined by Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker. While Castell's power concept still very much resonates within conventional power theories of the political sciences, which proclaim that someone holds power while someone else doesn't, Galloway and Thacker open this notion towards the micro-elements within power relations of a networked society. Considering software and protocol as agents of power that proscribe the way how communication flows are possible, they open the black box of technology and understand it, like many other Science and Technology Studies Scholars, as enmeshed into societal relations, as products of societal relations and as production sites of societal relations. Code is law, code is an executable materiality, and code is flawed. The point of design is one possible point of resistance: “the possibilities afforded by Facebook to its users are infinite only as long as they subscribe to the normative operating logic of its design” and thus Stumpel's project, Fbresistance.com, plays with new designs to provoke new use.

Since many debates about Facebook either concentrate on how to use it the right way (i.e. more privacy aware) or ways to leave Facebook completely, Stumpel's proposal is original as it discusses how to empower users within Facebook, which at first glance looks counterintuitive and not so promising. And of course, the effects are limited because the remaining part of a systemic logic reduces the means of resistance to the degree that the key components of Facebook use need to remain operational. This is not a proposal for the n-th new, decentralized and non-commercial geek-affine network. In a sense, Stumpel reconsiders within the realm of an undemocratic regime the kind of bottom-up approaches that both, put pressure on Facebook and make it at least look more like an instance of software that the user has produced. As he writes “control is exercised through predefined options, preferences and possible actions which are imposed onto the user” (28) therefore a line of resistance, and thus empowerment, is to eliminate such predefined options and invent new ones beyond Facebook's regime.

These means are limited technically as the point of interrogation is on the client side. Most effectively, Facebook Resistance as Stumpel envisions it, is a tool [1] to change the User Interface beyond the default lines defined by either browser setting or the user's Facebook options page. The client-sided site of action has a surprising effect that goes clearly beyond what the company wants: because JavaScript is a powerful instance in the machinic process that affects not only how one sees the screen, but can change functionality and processes.

But there is a downside here: as much as Facebook interacts with single users and single users are replicating their subjectivity on Facebook in an opportunistic fashion, to use Greasemonkey [2] as tool of resistance keeps the effects of change limited to the individual user's page and screen. Friends that check a Facebook page that has been changed with Greasemonkey tools will not see these changes. They remain excluded from this resistance. This is because a client-side resistance designed with Greasemonkey cannot be shared and cannot become a common experience. Here, I think, the proposal to challenge Facebook within Facebook's realm reaches its limits and it becomes clear that the protocological regime is stable as long as its servers are not affected. The “exploit” that Galloway and Thacker seek as the contemporary form of resistance within digital environments need to be placed within the network and needs to have a bi-directional communication capacity to reach out. Stumpel argues that applying client-sided Javascript already is a way to exploit the protocological regime [3].

At the core of the rhetorics of Web 2.0 prosumerism is the blurring of production and consumption and the proclamation of the user as a productive entity. Stumpel's argument lies somewhat in between two worlds: rightly claiming that code is the key to digital autonomy and client side code cannot deliver this autonomy, like an alternative Social Networking Site that offers open protocols so that any other code base can connect. Scripting away one's Facebook page is a good start to understand the materiality of one's online presence.

A way out of this systemic dilemma is to publish screenshots of how one sees the page changed with self made scripts. This method has already proven to be a great aid in circumventing censorship [4], which is just another regime of what-you-see-is-what-we-want-you-to-see (WYSIWWWYTS). This as well shows the limits of power of code: image files can transport human centric layers that machines are (still) not capable to decode. Thus, by and large images remain a non-object in the code regime. This is a cheap and useful exploit.

As a lot of people don't feel the agency to leave Facebook altogether because they have invested too much of their social life into the machine, already one can consider this as Facebook's real power: the social lock-in. Thus all considerations to challenge Facebook from within its own domain and regime are ways to irritate Facebook's basic layer: their economy which is based on selling ads and data through standardized forms and sites. If a critical number of Facebook sites would be DIY styled, many clients of Facebook and the huge armada of third-parties behind it would fast be worried about their assumption that with Facebook, communal communications have been successfully commodified in a stable way that allows investments of billions of dollars.

Oliver Leistert
Oliver Leistert is a media researcher focusing on mobile, online, and protest media. Currently a research fellow at the Center for Media and Communication Studies at the Central European University, Budapest, he recently co-edited, together with Theo Röhle, the first critical volume about Facebook in German: Generation Facebook. Über das Leben im Social Net. He runs a little blog: http://nomedia.noblogs.org

[1].http://fbresistance.com/

[2].https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey

[3].For a larger list of scripts that are affecting one's view on Facebook, see https://userscripts.org/tags/facebook

[4].The art work of Christoph Wachter and Matthias Jud called Picidae takes screenshots of a site from one node of the internet and sends the view to a user somewhere else: http://net.picidae.net/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/media-coverage/facebook-resistance

Alternative Approaches to Social Change

praskrishna — 2012-01-30T06:04:23Z

Review of Maesy Angelina’s essay, "Digital Natives’ Alternative Approach to Social Change", in Digital Alternatives with a Cause Book 2: To Think, pp.64-76 by Nuraini Juliastuti.

Dominant assumptions about social movements need a redefinition. They are not compatible with youth movements, which are mainly operated within the framework of contemporary technology development.

Although being acknowledged as ‘the potential future directions of activism’, the capability of digital-based movements to bring about concrete changes has been in doubt. It has been associated with degrading terms such as ‘slacktivism’ or ‘click activist’. Some scholars consider it a quasi-movement, and argue that it needs to be accompanied with “real” activism.

Each movement calls for a different analytical lens. The source of predicaments of the digital movement opponents revolves around the persistence of focusing on concrete aspects of a movement. Unless we consider the tangible aspects, a proper understanding of a digital movement cannot be realized.

Observations about intangible aspects of a movement will keep a research from clinging to activism with a capital A, and start seeing a gradation in the social movement practices. It is constructive and opens the door to analyses of multi-dimensional movements such as the Blank Noise initiative (India). Drawing on methods of identifying new developments to the field of social movement, Maesy examines some aspects of it: the issue, strategy, site of action, and internal mode of organization.

First, a straightforward summary of Blank Noise. It is a movement to address sexual harassment against women in public spaces in India. Sexual harassment includes staring, catcalls, groping, and is usually disregarded as a one-off, casual incident. It also takes under purview ‘eve teasing’, generally considered soft sexual harassment. Established in 2003, the main workspaces of the collective are a combination of street interventions and online campaigns mediated on social media sites such as blogs, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter.

Blank Noise attempts to subvert populist notions of what activism is within culture. Artistic approaches are regarded not as merely illustrational, but integrated into the methods of drawing attention to sexual harassment.

It chooses not to see things through a simple black and white perspective, but from a more complex view; loose, not rigid, is an instructive term to explain the character of the movement that is held together by two stakeholders: youth and technology.

In the antecedent period—this essay provides little space for it and hence lacks a historical explanation—social movements were carried out by non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The keyword ‘society empowerment’ was in application then; embedded within is the idea of power relations. The NGO activists are powerful agencies and therefore have the authority to empower others.

In the case of Blank Noise, it consciously disrupts the mainstream notion of what a social movement entails and at the same time, displays coherencies within the accepted movement’s principles: the collective thus offers alternative approaches. An alternative movement however, is indicative of a classic pattern within the trajectory of social movements - it is a natural occurrence in response to a static state of affairs. Negotiations of the appropriate ways to confront circumstances are accelerating, putting old concepts of voluntarism, political participation, social contribution, and the meaning of being an activist into fragile categorizations. They are all subject to constant reinterpretations.

A new question then arises: as local people acknowledge Blank Noise as an outstanding example of citizen activism in India, does this youth initiative differentiate itself from other youth movements of its kind?

Online spaces formerly built to showcase the profile of movement organizers have now transformed into collaborative workspaces to archive and advocate women’s right movement. Interactivity has permeated through online spaces, replacing the static nature which was earlier associated with activism-related websites. The distance between the initiators and the participants is disappearing. The initiators and the participants are no longer two separate entities and are now joint content producers.

Some literatures characterize a social movement as a form of intellectual intervention. It is the practice of social intervention where the power is arranged in a relatively clear intellectual hierarchy. The dynamics of the action spaces has blurred such a hierarchy. Nonetheless, the question of class is still worth asking.

The issues of the ideologies of technologies being used in a movement, how they are operated, the actors behind them, what discourses are being developed, whose interests do they speak on behalf of, are important matters to be further explored to bring forth a reflection on power dynamics.

An undemanding way to value a social movement is through impact examination. A common way to assess impact is by observing the tangible aspects of the movement or campaign: the number of participants in activities conducted (do men and women participate equally in them?); the number of meetings; the organization’s coverage; public response to the campaign; statistics of crime. It asserts that a significant impact can be achieved through concrete goals and demands.

The question of impact meets its philosophical turn when dealing with a grey issue such as normalization of street sexual violence. The meaning of street sexual violence is hard to pin down. One of the possible ways to cope with it is through a micro-movement. It is a strategy, which aims to create changes at the personal level. The meaning of empowerment is shifting. In the case of Blank Noise, as the author puts it, “they empower people through their experience with the collective”.

Blank Noise differs from other types of movements in their inability to identify the opponent. Or, rather, they live a situation where it is impossible to establish who and what the opponent is. Rather than merely seeing it as a representation of the faltering state, as many scholars usually do, the author sees it as a ‘grey productive gesture’. It directs the course of the movement to a constant dialogue with the meaning of participation. Often unintentionally, it engages in the search of the meaning of what one can contribute to the others, without having the need to incorporate in, or being absorbed into, old society empowerment jargon. It attempts to remake the language of a movement.

But how should an opponent be defined? And how should change be defined? Although indirectly, the discussion on ways of organizing the movement as well as articulating the issue—the uncertainty about their values included, points to the base of the debate on the concept of activism. As each context is walking its own social-technological life path, and the division between the debatable terms ‘quasi-activism’ and ‘real activism’ requires an elaborate explanation, what changes should social movements bring (and how ‘real’ should they be), is still a difficult question to answer.

Changes function both as the foundation and goal of the digital native movement. Much as they indicate hopefulness, changes often turn out to be grim and lead to frustrating facts. As alternative ways of social movements are developing and being performed in various contexts, in particular historical junctures many things remain the same. Instead of progress, a series of setbacks become apparent.

It is as if each new movement’s strategy would bring back the possibilities of reversals and stagnancies, putting causes and choices in question. It is not about the seemingly clear separation between decisiveness and indecisiveness. This is the time when being decisive offers clichéd, predictable acts, which are often twisted into an intense, conservative attitude. This is the time when being indecisive is promisingly progressive and demonstrating the signs of thinking critically. It may seem indefinite, but it provides spaces for resiliency, an important character to develop amid the chaotic situation.

Nuraini Juliastuti is the co-founder of KUNCI Cultural Studies Center (http://kunci.or.id/) established in 1999 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. She is currently a PhD student at Universiteit Leiden, Netherlands, focusing on popular music in Southeast Asia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/media-coverage/alternative-approaches-to-social-change-1