Centre for Internet & Society

Archives and Access

by Prasad Krishna

The monograph by Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto, is a material history of the Internet archives. It examines the role of the archivist and the changing relationship between the state and private archives for looking at the politics of subversion, preservation and value of archiving. By examining the Tamil Nadu and Goa state archives, along with the larger public and state archives in the country, the monograph looks at the materiality of archiving, the ambitions and aspirations of an archive, and why it is necessary to preserve archives, not as historical artefacts but as living interactive spaces of memory and remembrance. The findings have direct implications on various government and market impulses to digitise archives and show a clear link between opening up archives and other knowledge sources for breathing life into local and alternative histories.

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Digital (Alter)Natives with a Cause? — Book Review by Maarten van den Berg

by Prasad Krishna

‘Digital (Alter)Natives with a cause?’ is a collection of four books with essays published by the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India, and the Dutch NGO Hivos. The books come in a beautifully designed cassette and are accompanied by a funky yellow package in the shape of a floppy disk containing the booklet ‘D:coding Digital Natives’, a corresponding DVD, and a pack of postcards portraying the evolution of writing - in the sentence ‘I love you’, written with a goose feather in 1734, to the character set ‘i<3u’ entered on a mobile device in 2011.

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Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?

by Nishant Shah

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.

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Between the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism

by Nishant Shah

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.

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Between the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism

by Nishant Shah

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.

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

by kaeru

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.

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What scares a Digital Native? Blogathon

by Samuel Tettner

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.

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Who the Hack?

by Prasad Krishna

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.

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Cyber Fears: What scares Digital Natives and those around them

by Samuel Tettner

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

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One for the avatar

by Prasad Krishna

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.

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