Pathways to Higher Education

Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?

nishant — 2015-04-10T09:22:29Z

Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society have consolidated their three year knowledge inquiry into the field of youth, technology and change in a four book collective “Digital AlterNatives with a cause?”. This collaboratively produced collective, edited by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen, asks critical and pertinent questions about theory and practice around 'digital revolutions' in a post MENA (Middle East - North Africa) world. It works with multiple vocabularies and frameworks and produces dialogues and conversations between digital natives, academic and research scholars, practitioners, development agencies and corporate structures to examine the nature and practice of digital natives in emerging contexts from the Global South.

Introduction

In the 21^st Century, we have witnessed the simultaneous growth of internet and digital technologies on the one hand, and political protests and mobilisation on the other. Processes of interpersonal relationships, social communication, economic expansion, political protocols and governmental mediation are undergoing a significant transition, across in the world, in developed and emerging Information and Knowledge societies.

The young are often seen as forerunners of these changes because of the pervasive and persistent presence of digital and online technologies in their lives. The “ Digital Natives with a Cause?” is a research inquiry that uncovers the ways in which young people in emerging ICT contexts make strategic use of technologies to bring about change in their immediate environments. Ranging from personal stories of transformation to efforts at collective change, it aims to identify knowledge gaps that existing scholarship, practice and popular discourse around an increasing usage, adoption and integration of digital technologies in processes of social and political change.

Methodology

In 2010-11, three workshops in Taiwan, South Africa and Chile, brought together around 80 people who identified themselves as Digital Natives from Asia, Africa and Latin America, to explore certain key questions that could provide new insight into Digital Natives research, policy and practice. The workshops were accompanied by a ‘Thinkathon’ – a multi-stakeholder summit that initiated conversations between Digital Natives, academic researchers, scholars, practitioners, educators, policy makers and corporate representatives to share learnings on new questions: Is one born digital or does one become a Digital Native? How do we understand our relationship with the idea of a Digital Native? How do Digital Natives redefine ‘change’ and how do they see themselves implementing it? What is the role that technologies play in defining civic action and social movements? What are the relationships that these technology based identities and practices have with existing social movements and political legacies? How do we build new frameworks of sustainable citizen action outside of institutionalisation?

Rationale

One of the knowledge gaps that this book tries to address is the lack of digital natives’ voices in the discourse around them. In the occasions that they are a part of the discourse, they are generally represented by other actors who define the frameworks and decide the issues which are important. Hence, more often than not, most books around digital natives concentrate on similar sounding areas and topics, which might not always resonate with the concerns that digital natives and other stake-holders might be engaged with in their material and discursive practice. The methodology of the workshops was designed keeping this in mind. Instead of asking the digital natives to give their opinion or recount a story about what we felt was important, we began by listening to their articulations about what was at stake for them as e-agents of change. As a result, the usual topics like piracy, privacy, cyber-bullying, sexting etc. which automatically map digital natives discourse, are conspicuously absent from this book. Their absence is not deliberate, but more symptomatic of how these themes that we presumed as important were not of immediate concerns to most of the participants in the workshop who are contributing to the book.

Structure

The conversations, research inquiries, reflections, discussions, interviews, and art practices are consolidated in this four part book which deviates from the mainstream imagination of the young people involved in processes of change. The alternative positions, defined by geo-politics, gender, sexuality, class, education, language, etc. find articulations from people who have been engaged in the practice and discourse of technology mediated change. Each part concentrates on one particular theme that helps bring coherence to a wide spectrum of style and content.

Book 1: To Be: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

The first part, To Be, looks at the questions of digital native identities. Are digital natives the same everywhere? What does it mean to call a certain population ‘Digital Natives”? Can we also look at people who are on the fringes – Digital Outcasts, for example? Is it possible to imagine technology-change relationships not only through questions of access and usage but also through personal investments and transformations? The contributions help chart the history, explain the contemporary and give ideas about what the future of technology mediated identities is going to be.

Book 2: To Think: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

In the second section, To Think, the contributors engage with new frameworks of understanding the processes, logistics, politics and mechanics of digital natives and causes. Giving fresh perspectives which draw from digital aesthetics, digital natives’ everyday practices, and their own research into the design and mechanics of technology mediated change, the contributors help us re-think the concepts, processes and structures that we have taken for granted. They also nuance the ways in which new frameworks to think about youth, technology and change can be evolved and how they provide new ways of sustaining digital natives and their causes.

Book 3: To Act: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

To Act is the third part that concentrates on stories from the ground. While it is important to conceptually engage with digital natives, it is also, necessary to connect it with the real life practices that are reshaping the world. Case-studies, reflections and experiences of people engaged in processes of change, provide a rich empirical data set which is further analysed to look at what it means to be a digital native in emerging information and technology contexts.

Book 4: To Connect : Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

The last section, To Connect, recognises the fact that digital natives do not operate in vacuum. It might be valuable to maintain the distinction between digital natives and immigrants, but this distinction does not mean that there are no relationships between them as actors of change. The section focuses on the digital native ecosystem to look at the complex assemblage of relationships that support and are amplified by these new processes of technologised change.

We see this book as entering into a dialogue with the growing discourse and practice in the field of youth, technology and change. The ambition is to look at the digital (alter)natives as located in the Global South and the potentials for social change and political participation that is embedded in their interactions through and with digital and internet technologies. We hope that the book furthers the idea of a context-based digital native identity and practice, which challenges the otherwise universalist understanding that seems to be the popular operative right now. We see this as the beginning of a knowledge inquiry, rather than an end, and hope that the contributions in the book will incite new discussions, invoke cross-sectorial and disciplinary debates, and consolidate knowledges about digital (alter)natives and how they work in the present to change our futures.

Click here to order your copy. We invite readers to contribute reviews of an essay they found particularly interesting. Contact us: nishant@cis-india.org and fjansen@hivos.nl if you want more information, resources, or dialogues

Nishant Shah

Fieke Jansen

For media coverage and book reviews, read here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook

Between the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism

nishant — 2015-05-14T12:14:04Z

In this peer reviewed research paper, Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen draws on a research project that focuses on understanding new technology, mediated identities, and their relationship with processes of change in their immediate and extended environments in emerging information societies in the global south. It suggests that endemic to understanding digital activism is the need to look at the recalibrated relationships between the state and the citizens through the prism of technology and agency. The paper was published in Democracy & Society, a publication of the Center for Democracy and Civil Society, Volume 8, Issue 2, Summer 2011.

Introduction

The first decade of the 21st century has witnessed the simultaneous growth of the Internet and digital technologies on the one hand and political protests and mobilization on the other. As a result, some stakeholders attribute magical powers of social change and political transformation to these technologies.

In the post-Wikileaks world, governments try to censor the use of and access to information technologies in order to maintain the status quo (Domscheit-Berg 2011). With the expansion of markets, technology multinationals and service providers are trying to strike a delicate balance between ethics and pro6ts. Civil society organizations for their part, are seeking to counterbalance censorship and exploitation of the citizens’ rights. Within discourse and practice, there remains a dialectic between hope and despair: Hope that these technologies will change the world, and despair that we do not have any sustainable replicable models of technology-driven transformation despite four decades of intervention in the 6eld of information and communication technology (ICT).

This paper suggests that this dialectic is fruitless and results from too strong of a concentration on the functional role of technology. The lack of vocabulary to map and articulate the transitions that digital technologies bring to our earlier understanding of the state-market-citizen relationship, as well as our failure to understand technology as a paradigm that defines the domains of life, labour, and language, amplify this knowledge gap.

This paper draws on a research project that focuses on understanding new technology, mediated identities, and their relationship with processes of change in their immediate and extended environments in emerging information societies in the global south (Shah 2009). We suggest that endemic to understanding digital activism is the need to look at the recalibrated relationships between the state and the citizens through the prism of technology and agency.

Context

It is appropriate, perhaps, to begin a paper on digital activism, with a discussion of analogue activism[1] (Morozov 2010). In the recent revolutions and protests from Tunisia to Egypt and Iran to Kryzygystan, much attention has been given to the role of new media in organizing, orchestrating, performing, and shaping the larger public psyche and the new horizons of progressive governments. Global media has dubbed several of them as ‘Twitter Revolutions” and “Facebook Protests” because these technologies played an important role in the production of :ash-mobs, which, because of their visibility and numbers, became the face of the political protests in di)erent countries. Political scientists as well as technology experts have been trying to figure out what the role of Twitter and Facebook was in these processes of social transformation. Activists are trying to determine whether it is possible to produce replicable upscalable models that can be transplanted to other geo-political contexts to achieve similar results,[2] as well as how the realm of political action now needs to accommodate these developments.

Cyber-utopians have heralded this particular phenomenon of digital activists mobilizing in almost unprecedented numbers as a hopeful sign that resonates the early 20th century rhetoric of a Socialist Revolution (West and Raman 2009). (ey see this as a symptom of the power that ordinary citizens wield and the ways in which their voices can be ampli6ed, augmented, and consolidated using the pervasive computing environments in which we now live.

In a celebratory tone, without examining either the complex assemblages of media and government practices and policies that are implicated in these processes, they naively attribute these protests to digital technologies.

Cyber-cynics, conversely, insist that these technologies are just means and tools that give voice to the seething anger, hurt, and grief that these communities have harboured for many years under tyrannical governments and authoritarian regimes. They insist that digital technologies played no role in these events — they would have occurred anyway, given the right catalysts — and that this overemphasis on technology detracts from greater historical legacies, movements, and the courage and efforts of the people involved.

While these debates continue to ensue between zealots on conflicting sides, there are some things that remain constant in both positions: presumptions of what it means to be political, a narrow imagination of human-technology relationships, and a historically deterministic view of socio-political movements. While the objects and processes under scrutiny are new and unprecedented, the vocabulary, conceptual tools, knowledge frameworks, and critical perspectives remain unaltered. They attempt to articulate a rapidly changing world in a manner that accommodates these changes. Traditional approaches that produce a simplified triangulation of the state, market and civil society, with historically specified roles, inform these discourses, “where the state is the rule-maker, civil society the do-gooder and watchdog, and the private sector the enemy or hero depending on one’s ideological stand” (Knorringa 2008, 8).

Within the more diffuse world realities, where the roles for each sector are not only blurred but also often shared, things work differently. Especially when we introduce technology, we realize that the centralized structural entities operate in and are better understood through a distributed, multiple avatar model. For example, within public-private partnerships, which are new units of governance in emerging post-capitalist societies, the market often takes up protostatist qualities, while the state works as the beneficiary rather than the arbitrator of public delivery systems. In technology-state conflicts, like the well-known case of Google’s conflict with China (Drummond 2010), technology service providers and companies have actually emerged as the vanguards of citizens’ rights against states that seek to curb them.

Similarly, civil society and citizens are divided around the question of access to technology. The techno-publics are often exclusive and make certain analogue forms of citizenships obsolete. While there is a euphoria about the emergence of a multitude of voices online from otherwise closed societies, it is important to remember that these voices are mediated by the market and the state, and often have to negotiate with strong capillaries of power in order to gain the visibility and legitimacy for themselves. Additionally, the recalibration in the state-market-citizen triad means that there is certain disconnect from history which makes interventions and systemic social change that much more difficult.

Snapshots

We draw from our observations in the “Digital Natives with a Cause?”[3] research program, which brought together over 65 young people working with digital technologies towards social change, and around 40 multi-sector stakeholders in the field to decode practices in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between technology and politics.

The first case study is from Taiwan, where the traditionally accepted uni-linear idea of senders-intermediaries-passive receivers is challenged by adopting a digital information architecture model for a physical campaign.[4] The story not only provides insight into these blurred boundaries and roles, but also offers an understanding of the new realm of political intervention and processes of social transformation.

As YiPing Tsou (2010) from the Soft Revolt project in Taipei explains, "I have realised how the Web has not only virtually reprogrammed the way we think, talk, act and interact with the work but also reformatted our understanding of everyday life surrounded by all sorts of digital technologies."

Tsou’s own work stemmed from her critical doubt of the dominant institutions and structures in her immediate surroundings. Fighting the hyper-territorial rhetoric of the Internet, she deployed digital technologies to engage with her geo-political contexts. Along with two team members, she started the project to question and critique the rampant consumerism, which has emerged as the state and market in Taiwan collude to build more pervasive marketing infrastructure instead of investing in better public delivery systems. The project adopted a gaming aesthetic where the team produced barcodes, which when applied to existing products in malls and super markets, produced random pieces of poetry at the check-out counters instead of the price details that are expected. The project challenged the universal language of barcodes and mobilized large groups of people to spread these barcodes and create spaces of confusion, transient data doubles, and alternative ways of reading within globalized capitalist consumption spaces. The project also demonstrates how access to new forms of technology also leads to new information roles, creating novel forms of participation leading to interventions towards social transformation.

Nonkululeko Godana (2010) from South Africa does not think of herself as an activist in any traditional form. She calls herself a storyteller and talks of how technologies can amplify and shape the ability to tell stories. Drawing from her own context, she narrates the story of a horrific rape that happened to a young victim in a school campus and how the local and national population mobilized itself to seek justice for her. For Godana, the most spectacular thing that digital technologies of information and communication offer is the ability for these stories to travel in unexpected ways. Indeed, these stories grow as they are told. They morph, distort, transmute, and take new avatars, changing with each telling, but managing to help the message leap across borders, boundaries, and life-styles. She looks at storytelling as something that is innate to human beings who are creatures of information, and suggests that what causes revolution, what brings people together, what allows people to unify in the face of strife and struggle is the need to tell a story, the enchantment of hearing one, and the passion to spread it further so that even when the technologies die, the signal still lives, the message keeps on passing. As Clay Shirky, in his analysis of the first recorded political :ash-mob in Phillipines in 2001, suggests, "social media’s real potential lies in supporting civil society and the public sphere — which will produce change over years and decades, not weeks or months."

Propositions

These two stories are just a taste of many such narratives that abound the field of technology based social transformation and activism. In most cases, traditional lenses will not recognize these processes, which are transient and short-lived as having political consequence. When transformative value is ascribed to them, they are brought to bear the immense pressure of sustainability and scalability which might not be in the nature of the intervention. Moreover, as we have seen in these two cases, as well as in numerous others, the younger generation — these new groups of people using social media for political change, often called digital natives, slacktivists, or digital activists — renounce the earlier legacy of political action. They prefer to stay in this emergent undefined zone where they would not want an identity as a political person but would still make interventions and engage with questions of justice, equity, democracy, and access, using the new tools at their disposal to negotiate with their immediate socio-cultural and geo-political contexts.

In their everyday lives, Digital Natives are in different sectors of employment and sections of society. They can be students, activists, government officials, professionals, artists, or regular citizens who spend their time online often in circuits of leisure, entertainment and self-gratification. However, it is their intimate relationship with these processes, which is often deemed as ‘frivolous’ that enables them, in times of crises, to mobilize huge human and infrastructural resources to make immediate interventions.

It is our proposition that it is time to start thinking about digital activism as a tenuous process, which might often hide itself in capillaries of non-cause related actions but can be materialized through the use of digital networks and platforms when it is needed. Similarly, a digital activist does not necessarily have to be a full-time ideology spouting zealot, but can be a person who, because of intimate relationships with technologized forms of communication, interaction, networking, and mobilization, is able to transform him/ herself as an agent of change and attain a central position (which is also transitory and not eternal) in processes of social movement. Such a lens allows us to revisit our existing ideas of what it means to be political, what the new landscapes of political action are, how we account for processes of social change, and who the people are that emerge as agents of change in our rapidly digitizing world.

About the Authors

NISHANT SHAH is Director-Research at the Bangalore based Centre for Internet and Society. He is one of the lead researchers for the “Digital Natives with a Cause?” knowledge programme and has interests in questions of digital identity, inclusion and social change.

FIEKE JANSEN is based at the Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation (Hivos). She is the knowledge officer for the Digital Natives with a Cause? knowledge programme and her areas of interest are the role of digital technologies in social change processes.

References

Domscheit-Berg, Daniel. 2011. Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website. New York: Crown Publishers.

Drummond, David. 2010. “A New Approach to China.” Available at: http:// googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html.

Godana, Nonkululeko. 2011. “Change is Yelling: Are you Listening?” Digital Natives Position Papers. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://www.hivos.net/content/download/ 40567/260946/file/Position%20Papers.pdf. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

Knorringa, Peter. 2010. A Balancing Act — Private Actors in Development, Inaugural Lecture ISS. Available at: http://www.iss.nl/News/Inaugural-Lecture-Professor-Peter-Knorringa. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. New York: Public Affairs.

Shirky, Clay. 2011. “The Political power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change.” Foreign Affairs 90, (1); p. 28-41.

Shah, Nishant and Sunil Abraham. 2009. “Digital Natives with a Cause.” Hivos Knowledge Programme. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://cis-india.org/research/dn-report. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

Tsou, YiPing. 2010. “(Re)formatting Social Transformation in the Age of Digital Representation: On the Relationship of Technologies and Social Transformation”, Digital Natives Position Papers. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://www.hivos.net/ content/download/40567/260946/file/Position%20Papers.pdf. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

West, Harry and Parvathi Raman. 2009. Enduring Socialism: Exploration of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation. London: Berghahn Books.

End Notes

[1]Morozov looks at how ‘Digital Activism’ often feeds the very structures against we protest, with information that can prove to be counter productive to the efforts. The digital is still not ‘public’ in its ownership and a complex assemblage of service providers, media houses and governments often lead to a betrayal of sensitive information which was earlier protected in the use of analogue technologies of resistance.

[2]Following the revolutions in Egypt, China, worried that the model might be appropriated by its own citizens against China’s authoritarian regimes, decided to block “Jan25” and mentions of Egypt from Twitter like websites. More can be read here: http://yro.slashdot.org/ story/11/01/29/2110227/China-Blocks-Egypt-On-Twitter-Like-Site.

[3]More information about the programme can be found at http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/ Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause.

[4]Models of digital communication and networking have always imagined that the models would be valid only for the digital environments. Hence, the physical world still engages only with the one-to-many broadcast model, where the central authorities produce knowledge which is disseminated to the passive receivers who operate only as receptacles of information rather than bearers of knowledge. To challenge this requires a re-orientation of existing models and developing ways of translating the peer-to-peer structure in the physical world.

Cross-posted from Democracy & Society, read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/stirrup-and-the-ground

Between the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism

nishant — 2015-10-25T05:58:59Z

Cross-posted from Democracy and Society.

Introduction

In the post-Wikileaks world, governments try to censor the use of and access to information technologies in order to maintain the status quo (Domscheit-Berg 2011). With the expansion of markets, technology multinationals and service providers are trying to strike a delicate balance between ethics and profits. Civil Society Organizations for their part, are seeking to counterbalance censorship and exploitation of the citizens’ rights. Within discourse and practice, there remains a dialectic between hope and despair: Hope that these technologies will change the world, and despair that we do not have any sustainable replicable models of technology-driven transformation despite four decades of intervention in the 6eld of information and communication technology (ICT).

Context

Snapshots

Propositions

About the Authors

References

Domscheit-Berg, Daniel. 2011. Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website. New York: Crown Publishers.

Drummond, David. 2010. “A New Approach to China.” Available at: http:// googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html.

Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. New York: Public Affairs.

Shirky, Clay. 2011. “The Political power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change.” Foreign Affairs 90, (1); p. 28-41.

West, Harry and Parvathi Raman. 2009. Enduring Socialism: Exploration of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation. London: Berghahn Books.

End Notes

[1] Morozov looks at how ‘Digital Activism’ often feeds the very structures against we protest, with information that can prove to be counter productive to the efforts. The digital is still not ‘public’ in its ownership and a complex assemblage of service providers, media houses and governments often lead to a betrayal of sensitive information which was earlier protected in the use of analogue technologies of resistance.

[2] Following the revolutions in Egypt, China, worried that the model might be appropriated by its own citizens against China’s authoritarian regimes, decided to block “Jan25” and mentions of Egypt from Twitter like websites. More can be read here: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/01/29/2110227/China-Blocks-Egypt-On-Twitter-Like-Site.

[3] More information about the programme can be found here.

[4] Models of digital communication and networking have always imagined that the models would be valid only for the digital environments. Hence, the physical world still engages only with the one-to-many broadcast model, where the central authorities produce knowledge which is disseminated to the passive receivers who operate only as receptacles of information rather than bearers of knowledge. To challenge this requires a re-orientation of existing models and developing ways of translating the peer-to-peer structure in the physical world.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/between-the-stirrup-and-the-ground-relocating-digital-activism

We, the Cyborgs: Challenges for the Future of being Human

kaeru — 2015-04-06T15:48:35Z

The Cyborg - a cybernetique organism which is a combination of the biological and the technological – has been at the centre of discourse around digital technologies. Especially with wearable computing and ubiquitous access to the digital world, there has been an increased concern that very ways in which we understand questions of life, human body and the presence and role of technologies in our worlds, are changing. In just the last few years, we have seen extraordinary measures – the successful production of synthetic bacteria, artificial intelligence that can be programmed to simulate human conditions like empathy and temperament, and massive mobilisation of people around the world, to fight against the injustices and inequities of their immediate environments.

Rationale

All of these, in some way or the other, hint at new models of cyborgification which we need to unpack in order to understand a few questions which have been at the helm of all philosophical inquiry and practical design around Internet and Society:

How do we understand ourselves as human? What are the technologies that define being human?
How do conceptualise the technological beyond prosthetic imaginations? How do we understand technology (especially the digital) as a condition?
What are the new challenges we shall face in law, ethics, life and social sciences as we increasingly live in Cyborg societies?

We , the Cyborgs, is a first of its kind research inquiry that locates these questions in a quickly digitising India to see the challenges of being human in the time of technological futures. In her seminal body of work on Cyborgs, Donna Haraway had posited the cyborg as a creature of fiction and ironies; a monster, a trickster, a boundary creature that is irreducible to the existing binaries of human-technology, technology-nature, nature-regulation. In imagining the cyborg as simultaneously fictitious and embodied in practices of care and labour, Haraway was further hinting at a set of questions that have never really entered discourse on cyborgs: Who are we when we become cyborgs? What do we do with the cyborgs we have produced? What are the other kinds of cyborgs? What are the new places them? What are the other ways of understanding cyborgs? Asha Achuthan in her monograph Re:Wiring Bodies, maps these questions along the axes of Presence, Access, Inclusion and Resistance to understand ‘attitudes to technology’. Achuthan talks about a moment of elision where technology is separated from the human body in the space of policy and critique. In those moments of separation, there is the production of a cyborg body that is suddenly vulnerable because it does not have the support of the technological which was an essential part of its bodily experience. How does this body get assimilated in our technology practices? What are the axes of discrimination and inequity that are attributed to these bodies in the process of cyborg making? Who are the actors that play a part in designing these cyborg bodies and selves? In the Indian context, where there has been a legacy of being technosocial subjects and cyborg citizens in the nation’s own technoscience imagination of itself, we need to locate the cyborg in new sites and contexts to see what the regulation of technology and its integration in everyday life.

Methodology

Building upon her work, We, The Cyborgs, seeks to locate the cyborg in India, on 3 interdisciplinary but connected sites to examine how bodies, in their interaction with the design and practice of different processes of regulation and control, are in the process of becoming cyborgs. The inquiry locates the cyborg at intersections of Health Care, Planning and Gender, to start unpacking the different futures of the body-technology relationships that have been posited in terms like post-human, techno-social, simulated bodies, bodies as traffic, etc. In the process, it hopes to unravel the questions of methods, frameworks, ethics and practices of bodies in conditions of technology. We, The Cyborgs, aims to bring together a wide range of researchers and practitioners from different disciplinary locations including but not limited to – Art, Anthropology, Law, Planning, Architecture and Design, Gender and Sexuality studies, Cultural Studies, Life Sciences, Medicine, New Media Studies, etc. – to start a debate around some of the key issues around cyborgs and cyborg-making in their fields.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/the-cyborgs

What scares a Digital Native? Blogathon

tettner — 2015-05-14T12:16:14Z

What Scares technologized young people around the world? In an effort to present a view often not heard in traditional discourses, on Monday the 18th of April 2011, young people from across the world blogged about their fears in relation to the digitalisation of society.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/what-scares-a-digital-native-blogathon-1

Who the Hack?

praskrishna — 2015-05-14T12:16:59Z

A hacker is not an evil spirit, instead he can outwit digital systems to bring about social change, writes Nishant Shah in this column published in the Indian Express on April 24, 2011.

One of the most sullied words that have pervaded public discourse, with the rise of the internet, is “hacker”. The word conjures up images of a silent, menacing, technology-savvy young man, who, with his almost magical control over the digital realm, manipulates systems, changes the laws, rewrites the rules and takes complete control. We hear stories about criminals hacking often enough — people who break into national security systems and retrieve sensitive information, teenagers who crash servers by spamming them with unnecessary traffic, users who commit credit fraud by phishing or breaking into bank accounts, or shutting down entire systems by erasing all the code.

Hackers v/s Crackers

As many of us know, the term hacker has a different origin and meaning than its abused application. In fact, people who perform maleficent activities using their technological prowess are called “crackers” — these are people who use their ability to interact with a system in order to make personal gains or to harass others. A hacker is a person who has extraordinary technology skills and is able to manipulate digital systems and makes them perform tasks which were not a part of their original design. Which means that a geek who can hack into a server and uses the free space to host a free website, aimed for public good, or a techie who writes a programme that can use the idle computing time of your machines to run peer-to-peer networks, or a teenager who can break the constraints of an existing software to integrate it with other programmes, are all hackers. A hacker is defined by his ability to play around with the basic elements of a system (not necessarily digital and internet-based) and perform actions, sometimes for social good, but often, for fun and to explore the digital world’s frontiers. They are not the evil spirits that we often imagine them to be.

Hackers can be suffused with a spirit of civic good and of social beneficence. Around the world, hackers have used their technology skills to make public interventions to resolve a crisis in their environments. From the now notorious Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks platform to more positive efforts like Ipaidabribe.com, a civic hackers have emerged as our new heroes. Ipaidabribe.com is a civic hacking website, which allows users to use digital storytelling as a method by which they can start discussions on corruption and what we can do to change the systems.

Many digital natives are civic hackers. Aditya Kulkarni, one of our earliest participants with the “Digital Natives with a Cause” programme, is a digital native civic hacker. Like many young people in India, Aditya, from Mumbai, found the field of electoral politics opaque. He found it difficult to understand why good people voted for bad leaders and why large sections of the society shirk their responsibility to vote, thus leading to flawed governments. He, with his friends, started VoteIndia.in, a website where they collected information from public domain sources about electoral candidates in their local constituencies, so that voters could make informed decisions. The website was an instance of civic hacktivism.

I talk about hacking because I want to draw your attention to the phenomenon that started with Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption stance and the series of public interventions that surrounded it. Hazare has emerged as a hero for many. He has been trending on Twitter, there are pages dedicated to him on Facebook, Tumblr blogs have been spreading his word, text messages have urged people to come out in support. While there is much speculation about Hazare’s politics and the media spectacle that it has created, little attention has been given to Hazare’s almost exclusively off-line campaign and the way in which social media tools have been able to capture his momentum and turn it into a series of civic hacktivist interventions.

Flashmobs with people bearing candles and chanting against corruption emerged in cities. Public consultations organised by young people saw critical engagement with questions of corruption. The interwebz have been abuzz with people expressing opinions and calling for public mobilisation. Anti-corruption convictions have found resonance with people who, otherwise, despite having access to these technologies, would not necessarily have engaged in these kinds of civic hacktivities. This, for me, is not only a sign of hope but also a moment of understanding that digital activism is not always restricted to the digital domain.

As in the case of Aditya, and that of Hazare, the germ of an idea is often offline. The processes of protest and demonstration towards social change travel across the physical and the digital world. The idea of a digital native as a civic hacktivist reminds us that the young person behind the computer, in a virtual reality, is not dissociated from the embedded contexts of everyday life. Their skills with the computer often help them make critical interventions to mobilise social change.

See the original article published by the Indian Express here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/who-the-hack

Cyber Fears: What scares Digital Natives and those around them

tettner — 2015-05-15T11:45:05Z

Societies around the world are quickly digitising ...Twitter.... ...Facebook... ...Wireless accessible everywhere... “Digital Natives” are those who have figured how to use these technologies to their full potential But even they have real fears. If you are a Digital Native, are related to one or work with/alongside with one come share your fears with us! Blogathon: Many people bloging together at the same time on a shared topic Date: Monday April 18th, 2011 On http://digitalnatives.in

This is the 2nd blogathon of the "Digital Natives with a Cause?" project.

A blogathon is an event where people from all over the world blog about a shared topic together, at the same time, giving an interesting cross-cultural snapshot of the issue at hand.

We all have dreams, hopes and aspirations. What are you afraid of? in your personal life? in your practice? in your politics? or in your ideology?

As a young person using digital technologies - what scares you?

As someone who is related to a digital native - what scares you?

As someone who works with/along digital natives - what scares you?

Let's find out from 1st person accounts what scares young digital people, what scares their relatives and what scares their co-workers and team mates. Let's move beyond the stereotypes, the sensationalism and the mystery which surrounds this exciting concept, the "Digital Native". Tell us what you think!

come share your thoughts along with people from all over the world.

Blog together as one in the 2nd blogathon of "Digital Natives with a Cause?".

Sample fears:

If you are a digital native:
Are you scared of censorship or being denied access to the internet? are you scared of being stereotyped as geeky or nerdy? are you scared of the expectations society puts on you? Are you afraid of revealing too much of yourself online? are you simply afraid that the power might go out in the middle of the day?

If you are the parent / relative of a digital native:
Popular depictions paint older generations as paranoid of the access enjoyed by digital natives. Is this really true? is it true for you? are you afraid of what a digital native might be doing online? are you afraid of new technologies themselves? Do you have any fears that are not being articulated by current dialogues?

If you work with digital natives:
Are you afraid of the easy at which young people use digital technologies? are you afraid they might be under utilizing the potential of these tools?

Date: Monday April 18th, 2011
On http://digitalnatives.in
email: digitalnatives@cis-india.org
or check out the FB event: http://tinyurl.com/6h6vfmy

Check out the Cyber fears poster

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/cyber-fears-what-scares-digital-natives-and-those-around-them

One for the avatar

praskrishna — 2015-05-14T12:19:34Z

With increasing instances of online avatars being victimised, users who are part of these identities need to be protected against vicious attacks. A fortnightly column on ‘Digital Natives’ authored by Nishant Shah is featured in the Sunday Eye, the national edition of Indian Express, Delhi, from 19 September 2010 onwards. This article was published on April 3, 2011.

On March 21 the digital natives I worked with, across three continents, blogged to celebrate Human Rights Day in South Africa. The topic: What should be a right in the digital age? While the blogathon captured the diverse contexts and voices of digital natives around the globe, it got me thinking about the question of rights, technology and identity.

When it comes to technology-based rights — right to access, right to information, right to dis/connect, right to be online, right to privacy, etc. — there seems to be an understanding that these rights are granted to the person who engages with digital and internet technologies.

For instance, if somebody steals your identity online, you can ask for legal arbitration. The right of the physical user who is interacting with digital technologies is clearly violated. Similarly, other kinds of economic abuse through phishing or spam are also instances in which the right of the individual is clearly breached and hence justice can be dispensed.

However, in the wide world of the Web, things often become blurry. For those who simultaneously live their lives in the fused spaces of the physical and the digital, there are instances when violence takes place but there are no arbitrators for justice. One way of thinking about this, is by looking at the digital avatars that we create online. Avatars are generally visual simulations that people create for themselves to mark their presence on the Web. Within the more traditional digital interactions, avatars are straightforward — pictures of people, icons, brands, photographs of pets, cartoons, or even text based signatures . Within role-playing games and virtual immersive environments, avatars can be more adventurous, often taking up the form of fantasy bodies that the users might aspire to have.

These avatars, for digital natives, are extensions of the self and an integral part of their online presence. A lucrative industry sells digital amenities, luxuries and brands to clothe and accessorise the avatars, so that they resemble the real-life user. The users invest time, money and resources to create unique avatars. However, these avatars, which are a combination of hardware, software and wetware — part machine, part code, part human being, despite their very material presence, do not really have any rights of their own.

Because they are treated only as cultural products, they are looked at only as objects rather than as animated identities. Popular law and culture treat avatars as external and not related to the users who create them. Within a digital universe, when an avatar gets abused, there are no rights that it can claim in order to find safety or justice. Our understanding of digital rights are so tied to the idea of physical loss and injury that unless a material loss to the physical body can be demonstrated, it becomes difficult to actually invoke the rights of the victim.

For example, in social networking sites like Facebook, it is common for younger users to bully people from their schools. Instead of a direct physical attack on the person, a series of “Hate pages” crop up, where conversations which were hitherto restricted to the circle of friends, are now openly hosted, attacking one particular person. Even more subtle are the campaigns to “De-friend” people, making them social pariahs by not allowing them access to social cliques. A common practice has also been to spam the person’s account with so many unnecessary emails that they can no longer access their important mails, which get lost in the deluge. These are serious attacks, which have direct impacts on the victim’s social and mental state.

Because no obvious physical harm is done, because there is no straightforward attack on the person involved or a demonstrable loss to any physical person, these attacks go unnoticed and unresolved. Even when these claims are brought to the notice of authority, the victim is asked to “move on” because it is “merely the internet”.

It is time to realise that there is nothing “mere” about the internet and the world of digital social interaction. What happens to the online persona has direct and often horrifying consequences to bodies in the physical world. And it is time to think of the right of the avatar, so that the users, who are a part of these identities, can also be protected. If I had to choose, in the digital age, the right to be an avatar, would be the right to vote for.

Read the original in the Indian Express here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/one-avatar

I Believe that .......... should be a Right in the Digital Age

tettner — 2015-05-14T12:20:12Z

On Monday March 21, 2011, people from three continents blogged about what they believe will/should/are rights in the digital age, as part of the "Digital Natives with a Cause?" project. From "free music" to "many identities", people have a varied and rich set of beliefs of what should constitute a right.

What do you think should be a right in the digital age?

This is the question which community members, facilitators and organizers of the “Digital Natives with a Cause?” project asked themselves on Monday, 21 March 2011.

Juan-Manuel Casanueva, a facilitator at the workshop in Chile, talks about the right to be heard and read by anyone. Juan Manuel sets up a historical picture, explaining that the quest for global dialogue advanced tremendously with the implementation of the Internet. Early proponents of the Internet spoke of a world where people, enabled by the technology, would communicate with each other seamlessly. Casanueva explains that this is not the case; roughly 30 years after the Internet began people are still using the Internet as an extension of their community-based communication model. Now that the hardware is there, it is time to start questioning the other and possibly more subtle aspects of global communication like the linguistics and social attitudes…

But of course, how could we all communicate if not all of us have access yet? This is an issue that Nilofar, a participant of the workshop in Taipei, and Fernanda another participant from Ecuador explores more in depth in their post. The right to access information freely and universally is one which Nilofar advocates be expanded beyond those with disability to include “your friend, neighbour or the needy nerd?” This way, access will not only be provided to those below the poverty line, but for those who already enjoy access, it won’t continue to be politicized, corrupted, commoditized and in general under-utilized.

Paidamoyo also talks about access, specifically access by women. He describes the emergence of digital technologies as being crucial to the enlargement of the gap between men and women, simply because men enjoyed more access. Today, women have been left outside of the technology revolution, which is a huge problem since 52 per cent of the world’s population consists of women.

To properly access all of the wonders that the world of Internet offers we need to know how to physically operate a computer, but there are a series of more intangible skills needed. Simeon, a participant from the workshop in Johannesburg proposes that being digitally literate should be a right in the information age. What does he mean by being literate? Well, Simeon explains that “digital” is more of a mindset than a condition: it is an approach to life and not a method. “A number of people may have access to digital tools and technology but very few will get the opportunity to learn the techniques needed to maximize their investment on digital tools” he says, and it is as useful or sometimes more to teach people about the value and the potential uses of digital technologies than the mere skill.

Now, what do we do with all the information once we have accessed it? Jenny from Costa Rica believes we should share it. Spreading the digital love should be a right according to her, because sharing is analogous to growing: a process which makes us better. “we are entitled to share. We like to share our opinions, our work, to share questions and even complaints. It is a natural response, an impulse, you may think” She mentions platforms like bandcamp where musicians can upload their music and share it for free, and Creative Commons licenses which allow for legal ways of collaborating while maintaining authorship rights. But what happens when the information online is restricted and modifying it or sharing it is illegal? Adolfo from Nicaragua believes we all have the right to hack! Adolfo explains that nowadays “hacking” has negative overtones, but that the origins of the word simply refer to someone who modified trains for better performance or appeal. Adolfo believes that if he pays for something, he has the right to modify it, change it, tweak it, add to it, remove from it, and deface it in any way he wants. Adolfo and Shehla from India would get along very well, because Shehla believes free music should be a right in the digital age. What is stealing? Are we reaching a point where illegally downloading music is not morally incorrect? “(most people) would never think of stealing a CD from a store (or at least not that easily). So what exactly is stealing? And more so, in the online world? It’s as easy as the click of a button… can’t be that bad”.

Still, not everyone advocated for increasing access, Fieke from Hivos in the Netherlands believes that being able to unplug is a right. Fieke tells of how she lives a technologically savvy life, having a presence on Facebook, Twitter and other social media, answering emails for the better part of the day, but she does enjoy being able to turn off her cellphone and enjoy the sun on a clear day. Are we losing our ability to do that? When you send an sms message, do you expect the person to answer immediately? What kind of pressure does this put us under? It might not be as easy as we think to disconnect ourselves: The discourse of accessibility as a right plays an important role in development, so institutionalizing the right to disconnect might prove counter-productive if it is abused as an excuse to purposely alienate or marginalize certain groups. We also have to think that there are financial interests at play, as the more connected one is the more can be sold to one and the more that can be commoditized. Angela from the Philippines has a similar concern: Are we losing the right to not know? With the increasing arrival of web 3, the amount of information we constantly access, manipulate, assimilate and re-transmit is vast. In an age of ubiquitous information bombardment, can we choose to be ignorant? Are there any situations where actually not knowing is a valid alternative?

Some people focused on how we access (or choose to not access) information and what we do with it, some others focused on how said access affects our personalities, our identities and who we perceive we are. Nishant from CIS in India thinks that having multiple identities should be a right in the digital age. Nishant explains that even though we all have different aspects of our personalities which constitute different identities, because of the nature of social interactions and the spaces where these occurred, we were forced to choose one identity at a time. “The analogue individual was subjected to the laws of linear physics and time, where s/he was allowed to be only one person at one time and mapped to the one body”. Now, with the arrival of the digital individual, we can be many in many ways, in many spaces, simultaneously.

Because we can express our different identities freely and without needing to be consolidated into “one”, this frees up the possibility of having multiple and often contradictory opinions. The Internet has the potential of being a place where one can explore the varying meanings and impacts of each of his/her identities. Yet, experiences online get “fixed” into one of these identities, for example, if I am the person who usually posts news on my Facebook page, the community around me tends to expect this kind of behaviour from me, to the point where if I want to change my mind I need to withdraw completely from the community. This is why Josine from HIVOS in the Netherlands thinks that there should be more online spaces where one is allowed to change one’s mind. A related idea to that one of being able to change one’s mind according to the particular identity is the ability to choose one’s identity. Samuel Tettner expresses that the analogue person’s personality was directly tied to his/her environment and surroundings. This way, the identity was determined by the place where one was born, the surrounding community and its language, customs and traditions. In the digital age, people have access to a much more culture, and the global quality of the Internet is helping to break the continuity between physical space and identity.

So, what do you think of cross-section of what people think should be rights in the digital age? Write down your comments please. Of course, if you don’t, you’d still be within your rights as a digital being, at least according to Prabhas who lives in Kosovo. Prabhas believes that the right to lurk should be a right in the digital age. “In an age of increasing digital participation, silent participation must be considered participation, and left be. Not everyone needs to comment, vote, whatever else. Some may just read/watch/listen, and perhaps, appreciate. It is okay if no thumb is clicked up, no quick reply sent back. No blog written."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/i-believe-that-______-should-be-a-right-in-the-digital-age

Reflecting from the Beyond

maesy — 2015-05-14T12:21:29Z

After going ‘beyond the digital’ with Blank Noise through the last nine posts, the final post in the series reflects on the understanding gained so far about youth digital activism and questions one needs to carry in moving forward on researching, working with, and understanding digital natives.

Throughout the series, I have argued the following points. Firstly, the 21^st century society is changing into a network society and that youth movements are changing accordingly. I have outlined the gaps in the current perspectives used in understanding the current form and proposed to approach the topic by going beyond the digital: from a youth standpoint, exploring all the elements of social movement, and based on a case study in the Global South – the uber cool Blank Noise community who have embraced the research with open arms. The methodology has allowed me to identify the newness in youth’s approach to social change and ways of organizing. Although I do not mean to generalize, there are some points where the case study resonates with the broader youth movement of today. In this concluding post, I will reflect on how the research journey has led me to rethink several points about youth, social change, and activism.

While social movements are commonly imagined to aim for concrete structural change, many youth movements today aim for social and cultural change at the intangible attitudinal level. Consequently, they articulate the issue with an intangible opponent (the mindset) and less-measurable goals. Their objective is to raise public awareness, but their approach to social change is through creating personal change at the individual level through engagement with the movement. Hence, ‘success’ is materialized in having as many people as possible involved in the movement. This is enabled by several factors.

The first is the Internet and new media/social technologies, which is used as a site for community building, support group, campaigns, and a basis to allow people spread all over the globe to remain involved in the collective in the absence of a physical office. However, the cyber is not just a tool; it is also a public space that is equally important with the physical space. Despite acknowledging the diversity of the public engaged in these spaces, youth today do not completely regard them as two separate spheres. Engaging in virtual community has a real impact on everyday lives; the virtual is a part of real life for many youth (Shirky, 2010). However, it is not a smooth ‘space of flows’ (Castells, 2009) either. Youth actors in the Global South do recognize that their ease in navigating both spheres is the ability of the elite in their societies, where the digital divide is paramount. The disconnect stems from their acknowledgement that social change must be multi-class and an expression of their reflexivity in facing the challenge.

The second enabling factor is its highly individualized approach. The movement enables people to personalize their involvement, both in terms of frequency and ways of engagement as well as in meaning-making. It is an echo of the age of individualism that youth are growing up in, shaped by the liberal economic and political ideologies in the 1990s India and elsewhere (France, 2007). Individualism has become a new social structure, in which personal decisions and meaning-making is deemed as the key to solve structural issues in late modernity (Ibid).

In this era, young people’s lives consist of a combination of a range of activities rather than being focused only in one particular activity (Ibid). This is also the case in their social and political engagement. Very few young people worldwide are full-time activists or completely apathetic, the mainstream are actually involved in ‘everyday activism’ (Bang, 2004; Harris et al, 2010). These are young people who are personalizing politics by adopting causes in their daily behaviour and lifestyle, for instance by purchasing only Fair Trade goods, or being very involved in a short term concrete project but then stopping and moving on to other activities. The emergence of these everyday activists are explained by the dwindling authority of the state in the emergence of major corporations as political powers (Castells, 2009) and youth’s decreased faith in formal political structures which also resulted in decreased interest in collectivist, hierarchical social movements in favour of a more individualized form of activism made easier with Web 2.0 (Harris et al, 2010).

A collective of everyday activists means that there are many forms of participation that one can fluidly navigate in, but it requires a committed leadership core recognized through presence and engagement. As Clay Shirky (2010: 90) said, the main cultural and ethical norm in these groups is to ‘give credit where credit is due’. Since these youth are used to producing and sharing content rather than only consuming, the aforementioned success of the movement lies on the leaders’ ability to facilitate this process. The power to direct the movement is not centralized in the leaders; it is dispersed to members who want to use the opportunity.

This form of movement defies the way social movements have been theorized before, where individuals commit to a tangible goal and the group engagement directed under a defined leadership. The contemporary youth movement could only exist by staying with the intangible articulation and goal to accommodate the variety of personalized meaning-making and allow both personal satisfaction and still create a wider impact; it will be severely challenged by a concrete goal like advocating for a specific regulation. Not all youth there are ‘activist’ in the common full-time sense, for most everyday activists their engagement might not be a form of activism at all but a productive and pleasurable way to use their free time - or, in Clay Shirky’s term, cognitive surplus (2010).

Revisiting my initial intent to put the term activism under scrutiny, I acknowledge this as a call for scholars to re-examine the concepts of activism and social movements through a process of de-framing and re-framing to deal with how youth today are shaping the form of movements. Although the limitations of this paper do not allow me to directly address the challenge, I offer my own learning from this process for the quest of future researchers.

The way young people today are reimagining social change and movements reiterate that political and social engagement should be conceived in the plural. Instead of “Activism” there should be “activisms” in various forms; there is not a new form replacing the older, but all co-existing and having the potential to complement each other. Allowing people to cope with street sexual harassment and create a buzz around the issue should complement, not replace, efforts made by established movements to propose a legislation or service provision from the state. This is also a response I offer to the proponents of the aforementioned “doubt” narrative.

I share the more optimistic viewpoint about how these new forms are presenting more avenues to engage the usually apathetic youth into taking action for a social cause. However, I also acknowledge that the tools that have facilitated the emergence of this new form of movement have existed for less than a decade; thus, we still have to see how it evolves through the years.

Hence, I also find the following questions to be relevant for proponents of the “hope” narrative. Social change needs to cater to the most marginalized in the society, but as elaborated before, the methods of engagement both on the physical and virtual spaces are still contextual to the middle class. Therefore, how can the emerging youth movements evolve to reach other groups in the society? Since most of these movements are divorced from existing movements, how can they synergize with existing movements to propel concrete change? These are open questions that perhaps will be answered with time, but my experience with Blank Noise has shown that these actors have the reflexivity required to start exploring solutions to the challenges.

The research started from a long-term personal interest and curiosity. In this journey, I have found some answers but ended up with more questions that will also stay with me in the long term. As a parting note before, I would like to share a quote that will accompany my ongoing reflection on these questions.

My advice to other young activists of the world: study and respect history... but ultimately break the mould. There have never been social media tools like this before. We are the first generation to test them out: to make the mistakes but also the breakthrough.

(Tammy Tibbetts, 2010)

This is the tenth and final post in the Beyond the Digital series, a research project that aims to explore new insights to understand youth digital activism conducted by Maesy Angelina with Blank Noise under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge Programme.

References:

Bang, H.P. (2004) ‘Among everyday makers and expert citizens’. Accessed 21 September 2010. http://www.sam.kau.se/stv/ksspa/papers/bang.pdf

Castells, M. (2009) Communication Power. New York: Oxford University Press.

France, A. (2007) Understanding Youth in Late Modernity. Berkshire: Open University Press.

Harris, A., Wyn, J., and Younes, S. (2010) ‘Beyond apathetic or activist youth: ‘Ordinary’ young people and contemporary forms of participaton’, Young Vol. 18:9, pp. 9-32

Shirky, C. (2010) Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. London: Penguin Press

Image source:

http://blog.blanknoise.org/2009/08/street-signs.html

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/reflecting-from-the-beyond

Science, Technology and Society International Conference – Some Afterthoughts

tettner — 2015-05-14T12:22:08Z

An international conference on Science, Technology and Society was held at the Indore Christian College on March 12 and 13. It was sponsored by the Madhya Pradesh Council of Science and Technology, Bhopal and organized by the Indore Christian College. Samuel Tettner, Digital Natives Coordinator from the Centre for Internet and Society attended this conference and is sharing his experience about the workshop.

This past weekend I attended the “Science, Technology and Society International Conference”. The experience was one of learning, more so on the idiosyncrasies and social particularities of academic research than on the subject matters presented at the conference.

I arrived in Indore late on Friday night; my plan was to just check into the hotel and watch some Tom and Jerry before falling asleep. Then I met the conference organizer, the head of the Department of Sociology at the Indore Christian College, who informed me that I would be one of the key-note speakers the next day and that I had around 40 minutes of speaking time. My presentation at that time was around 20 minutes, so there was less Tom and Jerry than expected. This was the first indication of the interesting cultural experience I was about to have.

As I navigated the rather austere streets of Indore, I realized that this was really a modest city. Not in population of course, because Indian cities are huge compared to pretty much anywhere else in the world, but in its aspirations. I quickly noticed I was the only white person on the streets. “I made the conference international”, I thought, but I was wrong: There was one more white person, a middle aged man from Hungary named Laszlo who had come to present his research on population. And so as the first day of the conference rolled on, Laszlo and I got a taste of some bizarre reverence that continued throughout the two days. I can’t say for sure if it’s the result of some colonial baggage, the Indian tradition of treating guests like gods, may be a combination of both, the truth is that we got treated with way too much respect and an uncanny humility that was at times a bit embarrassing. Laszlo and I got to sit on the stage, next to the former Indian ambassador to Fiji, the head of the college, and other conference organizers.

The influence of Hinduism in more rural areas is very visible, on the stage next to the podium was a huge representation of Saraswati (goddess of wisdom) and there was a constant puja being offered to her. I thought of the academia, the temple of rationality, the house of reason, surely cannot co-exist with the world of religion. It can, if anyone in the world can make it happen, it’s the Indians. There were floral offerings, and introductions, and dedications. It seemed the organizers were very concerned with decorum and pomp and circumstance, pleasing local government officials (I recognized them because they were fat and everyone smiled at them awkwardly) and maintaining a tradition I got the feeling they didn’t understand properly. This whole exercise was ironic to me, as the building was almost in ruins, there was no proper ventilation, and the restrooms were a complete mess with no proper running water, and so on.

Finally I got to speak. I only got 15 minutes because one local man (maybe a friend of one of the local politicians) took his sweet time delivering his speech. This was definitely not my crowd. I was presenting a small paper I wrote called “iCare: Emergent Forms of Technology-mediated Activism” which was basically a summary of two of the findings of “Digital Natives with a Cause?”: One was a concept of activism which moves away from one time campaigns and looks at the practice of activism as an every-day activity, which can be valued without the need of an issue nor a community. The other was an observation about the language of activism and how it relates to different communities, through the use of voice, terminology, literary devices, and context. These were not the topics most attendees were familiar with, for example at the beginning of the talk I asked how many people in the audience used Facebook, and about 15 of out 150 people raised their hands. Relating to the issues of people who use technology incessantly was difficult for this crowd, who were not familiar with terms like “Slacktivism” and “Digital Native”, and who generally held the view that modern society and its overuse of technology were chipping away at traditional Hindu family values.

I tried my best in those 15 minutes, to illuminate some of the basic conceptual bases of the kind of work we’re doing with “Digital Natives with a Cause?”. They enjoyed the presentation, or at least I gathered that from several people who came up to me afterwards and told me so. Many people came up to me and asked me where I was from, and I started saying “USA” after a while, because “Venezuela” does exist in their mind, and “South America” just means the south of the United States.

I got to learn a lot about academic life in more rural traditional social spaces. I am generally completely ignorant of rural life, as I was born in the capital of Venezuela, and have in general lived in very cosmopolitan and metropolitan cities all my life. However what little slices of rural life I had encountered while backpacking through India, were concentrated in the work around the house and the fields. I was under the impression that research, that academic pursuit, and that critical thinking, were activities reserved for the urban, the middle class, the English speaking. Attending this conference opened my view a bit in this respect. People in rural areas have their own academic culture, with their own research interests, views and perspectives, and in most cases, reliable data backing them. Granted, in many cases these cultures are reflections or copies of what comes out of the cities, (and the west to a certain extend) but many times they are not, and getting to experience the complexity of it was a great experience. For example, there were many papers presented which dealt with the politics of caste, which is a concept I have barely come in contact with while being in Bangalore. A lot of people also talked about sustainable development, the impact of technology on agriculture, how new chemical fertilizers are changing the lives of farmers, and one teacher talked about the exiting potential uses for the novel technology called the podcast.

It was then that it dawned on me: “Science, Technology and Society” meant a completely different thing to my audience than it did to me. My presentation about how people conversing on Facebook can be viewed as activism must have seemed so alien and disconnected to them. I left the place very pensive about the whole experience. After taking pictures with some children, I went to a mall, and stood in front of a McDonalds and wondered how globalization is allowing for encounters like this one: A Venezuelan young man speaking at a local college in Indore, in the cultural and geographical centre of India. I’d like to think I was breaking barriers, participating in inter-cultural dialogue, exemplifying the exchange of intellectual and cultural capital that I hope takes places in the following years after our markets have gone global. Then again, I might not have been, I might have confirmed their perception of the well-dressed Westerner, who gracefully does them the favour of speaking at their college, and then talks in an accent about some random and obscure topic no one has any idea about. I’m still trying to decipher what happened. Eventually I went back to my hotel and experienced possibly the one and only truly cross-cultural and global thing in today’s world: Tom and Jerry.

See the agenda here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/science-technology-and-society-conference-in-indore-march-12-13

Watson knows the Question

praskrishna — 2015-05-14T12:24:38Z

Now that an algorithm has given humans a run for their money on a quiz show, it’s time to rethink the idea of a machine. A fortnightly column on ‘Digital Natives’ authored by Nishant Shah is featured in the Sunday Eye, the national edition of Indian Express, Delhi, from 19 September 2010 onwards. This article was published on March 6, 2011.

Quantum theory suggests that multiple universes exist where every possible alternative can come true. If this were the case, somewhere there must be a world filled with machines that are looking at human evolution and figuring out new and advanced human machine relationships. Or for those who are not very quantum minded, imagine a world where machines are the evolved species and they depend upon human technology — emotional connections, semantic learning, etc. — for their daily transactions and survival. I am not suggesting a futuristic dystopia, like the kind that science fiction specialises in. However, it would be interesting to imagine a world where technology is not only at the periphery of human civilisation but at the centre of it.

I am proposing this world view to revisit the idea of a digital native. We have, so far, in scholarship and practice, education and policy, only looked at digital natives as young human beings who interact in new and innovative ways with evolving technologies, to form human-machine networks and assemblages. However, as Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence Augmentation develop to produce thinking technologies, it is time to start looking at being sapient as not necessarily a human condition.

Early last month, an artificially created super computing system called Watson (elementary, surely?) took the world by a storm as it competed against two human contestants on a popular American quiz show called Jeopardy! The trivia-based show provides answers clustered around a particular theme, and contestants have to ask the correct question to the answer, to win prize money. It is not a straightforward question-answer show because it relies on more than human memory and recollection. It gives cryptic clues (like the ones we are used to in a crossword), offers semantic relationships which need more than just a database memory, and relies on the contestants’ abilities to make creative connections between the clues in order to guess the right questions.

Watson, a product of seven years of research by IBM Research, works on an algorithm which simulates human language and cognitive patterns to make intelligent connections and deductions to understand the context of the clues and then provide answers. Powered by 2,800 super powered computers on a high-speed network, Watson competed against Jeopardy!’s biggest champions and made history as it showed extraordinary human learning and predictive powers. It has been one of the biggest achievements in advanced computing to develop an algorithm that mimics human learning and has changed the way in which we look at the human-machine relationship.

While much commentary on Watson revolves around what it means to be human, and subsequently, what it is to be a digital native, I have a different proposition to make. Perhaps, Watson’s debut on American television is not only about thinking what is human, but also about what it means to be a machine.

First, the Watson that appeared on TV was a sleek display screen that stood behind a lectern in the studio along with the human contestants. The original Watson was next door, being cooled by refrigeration units, but it appeared to the human audience (in and outside the studio) in its avatar. This was a radically new idea because we have always thought of the avatar as a technology based representation of human users. We find avatars on Facebook and in online role-playing games. To think of a machine appearing in a human form was radically new.

Second, Watson was not able to just make predictions by mining information. It was also able to display levels of confidence. If Watson was not confident about an answer, it did not push the buzzer to answer. In fact, once the information was harvested, it displayed its top three guesses to show that, like human contestants, it calculated risks of wrong answers.

Third, Watson was able to display or at least simulate human emotions. It took guesses even when in doubt. It showed a spirit of adventure and played big. It was disappointed when it lost or was happy when it got the answers. It was able to display its “emotions” through various displays in its form and could get the audience’s attention, applause and support.

What this experiment suggests to me is that Watson is perhaps a digital native. All our concentration has always been on human subjects, but synthetic life forms and technology-based intelligence, are blurring this distinction between humans and technologies. We should start thinking of a digital native as neither machine nor human being, but a combination of the two, residing simultaneously in both the realms of the physical and the digital. Watson is perhaps a new digital native, a technology that is growing and slowly learning from its interactions with the human world around it. One of these days, we might be living in the midst of computational devices, which, when we are flummoxed, might turn to us and say, “Elementary, my dear Sherlock!”

Contact: digitalnative@expressindia.com

Read the original in the Indian Express here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/watson-knows

Activism: Unraveling the Term

maesy — 2015-05-14T12:25:05Z

After discussing Blank Noise’s politics and ways of organizing, the current post explores whether activism is still a relevant concept to capture the involvement of people within the collective. I explore the questions from the vantage point of the youth actors, through conversations about how they relate with the very term of activism.

Youth's Popular Imagination of Activism

As a start, I need to clarify that ‘activism’ is not a concept that the participants are generally concerned with. For a majority of them, the conversation we had was the first time they thought of what the term means and reflect whether their engagement with Blank Noise is activism. Regardless of whether one identifies Blank Noise as a form of activism or not, all participants share a popular idea of what activism is.

Generally speaking, at an abstract level all participants saw activism as passionately caring about an injustice and taking action to create social change. At a more tangible level, all participants mentioned three elements as popular ideas about doing activism. The first is the existence of a concrete demands as a solution to the identified problem, such as asking for service provision or state regulations. Since these demands are structural, activism is also seen dealing with formal authority figures in the traditional sense of politics, the state. The second is the intensity and commitment required to be an activist, for many participants being an activist means having prolonged engagement, taking risks, and making the struggle a priority in one’s life. In other words, being an activist means “... being neck-deep, spending most if not all of your time, energy, and resources for the cause” (Dev Sukumar, male, 34). The third element relates to the methods, called by some as ‘old school’: shouting slogans, holding placards, and doing marches on the streets – all enacted in the physical public space. This popular imagination of activism becomes the orientation for participants in deciding whether Blank Noise is a form of activism and whether they are activists for being involved in it.

Activism as the Intention and Action

“I have an idea of what activism is but not what it exactly looks like.”

(Apurva Mathad, male, 28).

For those who think that Blank Noise is a form of activism, there was a differentiation between the idea at the abstract level and how it is manifested at a more tangible level. The definition of activism is the abstract one, while the popular ideas of doing activism do not define the concept but present the most common out many possible courses of actions. Blank Noise is fulfils all the elements in the abstract definition: a passion about an injustice, having an aim for social change, and acting to achieve the aim. Hence, Blank Noise is activism, but the way it manifests itself does not adhere to the popular imagination of doing activism. The distinction between Blank Noise’s methods with popular ones was emphasized, along with the difference in articulating goals.

Interestingly, not all participants who share this line of thinking called themselves as activists for being involved in an activism. Again, it must be reiterated that no participants ever really thought of giving a name to their engagement prior to the interview. Instead of saying ‘I am an activist’, they said ‘I guess I could be called an activist’ for the fact that they are sharing the passion and being actively involved in a form of activism, albeit in an unconventional manner.

Those who would categorize Blank Noise as activism but not call themselves activists related with a particular element on the popular idea of doing activism, which is getting “neck-deep”. They were helpers, volunteers, idea spreaders, but not an activist because their lives are not dedicated for the cause or their involvements were based on availability. On the other hand, these participants all said that Jasmeen is an activist for being completely dedicated to Blank Noise from its inception until today.

Activism as Particular Ways of Doing and Being

“What are the repercussions if activism is so fluidly defined? It can mean not questioning

privilege... not seeing the class divisions and still call yourself activist.”

(Hemangini Gupta, female, 29).

Most participants did not consider Blank Noise as an activism. Generally, this can be explained by the discrepancies between Blank Noise and the popular imagination on the tangible ways of doing activism. Blank Noise does not propose a concrete solution or make concrete demands to an established formal structure nor did it march on the streets and make slogans. However, the underlying attitude to this point of view is not of a younger generation finding the ‘old’ ways of doing activism obsolete. Rather, there was an acknowledgement that the issue itself causes the different ways of reading an issue and taking actions to address it.

Furthermore, there is an appreciation to the achievements and dedication of activists that deterred them from calling themselves activists. These people referred to their occasional participation and the fact that Blank Noise is not the main priority in their lives as a student or young professional despite being a cause they are passionate about. As reflected in the opening quote, being an activist for some participants also means deeply reflecting on their self position in terms of class, acknowledging their privileges, and putting themselves in a position that will enable them to imagine the experience of people who are also affected by the issue but has a different position in the society. In other words, being an activist is not just about doing but also about critically reflecting on one’s position in relation to the issue and how it influences the way an issue is being pushed forward. Thinking that they are not up to these standards, these youth choose to call themselves ‘volunteers’, ‘helpers’, or ‘supporters’.

Youth: The Activist, the Apathetic, and the Everyday

“Blank Noise is a public and community street arts collective that is volunteer-led and attempts to create public dialogue on the issue of street sexual violence and eve teasing.”

(Jasmeen Patheja)

“... a group of people against street sexual harassment and eve teasing.”

(Kunal Ashok, men, 29)

“... an idea that really works.”

(Neha Bhat, 19)

As clarified before, the participants did not use the words ‘movement’ and very few used ‘activism’ during our conversations. Instead, the terms they used to describe Blank Noise are represented in the quotes above: collective, community, group, project, and even as an idea. These phrases do not carry the same political baggage that ‘movement’ or ‘activism’ would; they also do not conjure a particular imagination that the other two terms would. These phrases are de-politicized and informal; they imply fluidity, lack of hierarchy, and room for manoeuvre.

The implied meanings in the terms reflect the debates on the average youth and political engagement. For the past decade, various youth scholars criticized the dichotomy of youth as either activists or apathetic in explaining the global trend of decreased youth participation in formal politics. The activists are either politically active Digital Natives engaged in new forms of social movements influenced heavily by new media or sub-cultural resistances, which only account for a fraction of the youth population that are mostly completely apathetic. This dichotomy ignored the ‘broad “mainstream” young people who are neither deeply apathetic about politics on unconventionally engaged’ (Harris et al, 2010).

These mainstream young people actually are socially and politically engaged in ‘everyday activism’ (Bang, 2004; Harris et al, 2010). These are young people who are personalizing politics by adopting causes in their daily behaviour and lifestyle, for instance by purchasing only Fair Trade goods, or being very involved in a short term concrete project but then stopping and moving on to other activities. The emergence of these everyday activists are explained by the dwindling authority of the state in the emergence of major corporations as political powers (Castells, 2009) and youth’s decreased faith in formal political structures which also resulted in decreased interest in collectivist, hierarchical social movements in favour of a more individualized form of activism (Harris et al, 2010). Internet and new media technologies are credited as an enabling factor, being a space and a medium for young people to express their everyday activism.

All of the research participants, perhaps with the exception of Jasmeen as the only one who has constantly been the driver Blank Noise its entire seven years, are these everyday makers, people who were involved with the Blank Noise either on a daily basis as a commentator, one-time project initiator and leader, or people who were active when they are available but remain dormant at other times. Blank Noise is a space where these individual forms of engagement could be exercised while remaining as a collective. The facilitation is not only by the flexibility of coming and going, but also the lack of rigid group rules and the approach of allowing Blank Noise to be interpreted differently by individuals. Considering that the mainstream urban youth are everyday makers who would not find ‘old’ or ‘new’ social movements appealing, this can be the reason why Blank Noise became so popular among youth; however, I would also argue that the fact that Blank Noise is the first to systematically address eve teasing is a determining cause.

The implications of this finding, together with other concluding thoughts, will be shared in the next and final post in the Beyond the Digital series.

This is the ninth post in the Beyond the Digital series, a research project that aims to explore new insights to understand youth digital activism conducted by Maesy Angelina with Blank Noise Project under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge Programme.

References:

Bang, H.P. (2004) ‘Among everyday makers and expert citizens’. Accessed 21 September 2010. http://www.sam.kau.se/stv/ksspa/papers/bang.pdf

Castells, M. (2009) Communication Power. New York: Oxford University Press.

Harris, A., Wyn, J., and Younes, S. (2010) ‘Beyond apathetic or activist youth: ‘Ordinary’ young people and contemporary forms of participaton’, Young Vol. 18:9, pp. 9-32

Image source: http://blog.blanknoise.org/2010/02/tweet-now-feb-17-27.html

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/activism-unraveling-the-term

"Digital Natives with a Cause?" newsletter Volume I

tettner — 2015-05-15T11:44:19Z

For everyone who is interested in learning more about the Digital Natives who form part of the "Digital Natives with a Cause?" community. The Newsletter includes opinion posts by participants from the three workshops, interview with them, comics and cartoons highlighting current issues affecting the community, as well as current news and discussions happening at the project website, www.digitalnatives.in

"Links in the Chain" is a bi-monthly publication which highlights the projects, ideas and news of the "Digital Natives with a Cause?" community members. The first volume was introductory and experimental in nature. Here are the two issues of volume I:

Links in The Chain - Volume I

Links in The Chain - Volume I issue II

For more information on"Digital Natives with a Cause?" please check out www.digitalnatives.in

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/digital-natives-with-a-cause-newsletter-volume-i

Internet, Society & Space in Indian Cities - A Call for Peer Review

praskrishna — 2015-04-06T15:52:21Z

Pratyush Shankar's research project on "Internet, Society & Space in Indian Cities" is a part of the Researchers @ Work Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. His monograph explores the trajectories of transformation and perception of cities in India in context with the rise of Information Technologies for communication and presence of an active digital space.

There has been, in the fields of design and architecture, a close link between the shape and imagination of the city spaces and the dominant technologies of the time. The study of space (architecture, public places and city form) can lead to very interesting insights into the expression of the society with respect to the dominant technologies. Manuel Castells argues that space is not a mere photo¬copy (reflection) of the society but it is an important expression (Castells, 2009). Fredric Jameson, in his identification of the condition of post-modernity demonstrates how the transition into new technologies is perhaps first and most visibly reflected in the architecture, as physical spaces get materially reconstructed, not only to house the needs and peripheries of the emerging technologies but also to embody their aesthetics in their design and built form (Jameson, 1991).

Earlier technologies have led to new understandings of the notions of the public and commons. Jurgen Habermas argues on how the emergence of print cultures and technologies led to a structural transformation of the public sphere by creating new and novel forms of participation and political engagement for the print readers. Within cinema studies in India, Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Madhav Prasad have looked at the 'cinematic city' — how material conditions of the city transform to house the cinema technologies, and how the imagination of certain cities is affected by the cinematic representations of these spaces (Rajadhyaksha, 2009). Mike Davis' formulations of an 'Ecology of Fear'(Davis, 1999) and Sean Cubbit's idea of 'The Cinema Effect' (Cubitt, 2005) also show the integral relationship that technologies have with the imagination and materiality of urban spaces.

I wish to explore the trajectories of transformation and perception of cities in India in context with the rise of Information Technologies for communication and presence of an active digital space. The issue of imagination is an important one here as much as the material realities of our cities. However, to begin with one needs to look at the very idea of cities in the Indian context. The fundamental idea of a city and that of a space becomes important here and has been explored in the chapter on cities. The issue of representation as related to ideas of 'social space' and 'abstract space' (Lefebvre, 1992) has been used as a methodological framework while analyzing cities. The social space of a city here refers to the production of space that is biomorphic and anthropological. From this perspective people and history and memory along with social economic processes play a strong role in its definition. Hence, city spaces cannot be understood as a collection of building and other material production alone but rather as an act of social production involving people over a long period of time. The appropriation and representation of cities is another important concern as it creates an imagination structure and often justifies the material transformation.

The research is primarily concerned with first creating an understanding of the cities in Indian context from the point of view of their social, technological and material productions. The ideas and representations of space therefore, become critical issues of exploration to understand the nature of imagination of space with reference to Indian cities. An empirical study of issues of spatial transformation was conducted in Bangalore and Gurgaon to find certain patterns and its correlation with the present discourses on the technology and the city. The issue of perception of lived in space, cartography and myth became important issues to understand the nature of the imagination of space and positioning of the digital space. The contradiction of a networked geography with the present spatial arrangement of cities that is the centre of a larger territory becomes important shifts to be accounted for while understanding the new geography. The patterns and possibilities in these new geographies of information technologies have been understood by studying three building programmes in the city. The question of transformation and future of cities and the position of digital space in these times then became an important one to answer. The initial study concerns with laying out a framework for examining the techno-spatial discourses in cities in general while establishing the key characteristics of its narration in the Indian context.

The Researchers At Work Programme, at the Centre for Internet and Society, advocates an Open and transparent process of knowledge production. We recognise peer review as an essential and an extremely important part of original research, and invite you, with the greatest of pleasures, to participate in our research, and help us in making our arguments and methods stronger. The first draft of the monograph is now available for public review and feedback. Please click on the links below to choose your own format for accessing the document.

We appreciate your time, engagement and feedback that will help us to bring out the monograph in a published form. Please send all comments or feedback by April 5, 2011 to nishant@cis-india.org or you can use your Open ID to login to the website and leave comments to this post.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/internet-society-space-in-indian-cities-a-call-for-peer-review