Centre for Internet and Society

IT and the cITy

nishant — 2009-09-18T10:45:27Z

Nishant Shah tells ten stories of relationship between Internet Technologies and the City, drawing from his experiences of seven months in Shanghai. In this introduction to the city, he charts out first experiences of the physical spaces of Shanghai and how they reflect the IT ambitions and imaginations of the city. He takes us through the dizzying spaces of Shanghai to see how the architecture and the buildings of the city do not only house the ICT infrastructure but also embody it in their unfolding. In drawing the seductive nature of embodied technology in the physical experience of Shanghai, he also points out why certain questions about the rise of internet technologies and the reconfiguration of the Shanghai-Pudong area have never been asked. In this first post, he explains his methdologies that inform the framework which will produce the ten stories of technology and Shanghai, and how this new IT City, delivers its promise of invisibility.

Shanghai. City of bits, bytes and Baozi. China’s home-grown success story that eclipses the colonial legends of HongKong. The city that was, until the Bejing Olympics, the showcase city which is now working hard at recovering some of its stolen glory as it prepares for the World Trade Expo in 2010. A city that is constantly at war with itself, trying to museumise its past, eradicate pockets of history and times, and running to escape its present and live in a futuristic tomorrow. A city that broke the distinctions of the public and the private, by privatising all that was public, and by encouraging the private to be constructed for a public spectacle. There are many stories of Shanghai to be told, but the one that needs to be told now, is about the space of the city and how, in its attempt to become an IT city, it has become a city of surfaces, all reminding you, in an overwhelming hypervisual way that is the predominant aesthetic of cyberspaces, that it is the city that not only houses technology but also embodies it, becoming, possibly, the only city in Asia that brings the IT back into the City.

A cursory glance around you, perhaps travelling in the uber efficient metro system that feeds into the mobile metaphor of accelerated speed and space that Shanghai has become, or just walking down the more touristy XinTianDi where the rich and the famous of Shanghai’s society hang out, or walking down the HuaiHai Road where sky-scrapers fortress the sky and shopping malls greet you with neon-lit spaces of consumption, you are overwhelmed at the significant and ubiquitous presence of internet technologies. The buildings are designed to be interfaces, rather than walls, covered constantly with the graffiti of digital advertisements, live weather and stock updates, displaying the latest block-buster movie, or just presenting a kaleidoscopic array of lights spiralling in a dizzying, schizophrenic style on the surfaces of the buildings. As you walk through the sci-fi inspired urban landscape, you try and suppress the feeling of being inside a giant-size arcade game, waiting for a gobbling monster to come and devour you, and continue browsing at the city that never remains the same – either the surfaces mutate so that not even signboards or billboards remain the same, or the very buildings disappear into rubble under the shadows of gigantic cranes, as a concentrated demand for real estate necessitates a constant recycling of limited space (The estimate says that 60 per cent of Shanghai gets rebuilt every ten years), or high speed transport dissolves the city into a blur so that only the biggest and the brightest buildings stay as north-stars to the fluid geography of the city.

If you happen to stand on the magnificent Bund in PuXi (The older Shanghai), you keep on looking down at the ground beneath your feet, making sure that it is still there, because the slightly lurid but dazzling sky-line that faces you, with huge LCD screens mounted on buildings, lights flirting with low lying clouds on the top of gigantic buildings, and a constant buzz of electricity breaking the waves in the Huangpu river, you know that you are in a city that gives IT its address. No other city in Asia – not even the almost-not-Asia spaces of Tokyo or Singapore – gives you the assurance of being completely and totally immersed in the glory of Internet technologies. Shanghai stands, networked, connected, mobile, accelerated, and in a time-less vacuum that hoovers the future into the present, as a city that technology studies will have to reckon with in a paradigm of its own.

And so strong is this seduction of technology that conversations about technology and its place in Shanghai, always revolves around the surface – about the building of the surface, about the dissolution of depth (temporal or spatial), and about imagining the city only in terms of light, connectivity, and speed. So that the historicity in PuXi becomes a flat display of the Chinese Way (Zhongguo Fangshi) and the work-in-progress present in PuDong remains a quest for the future. In this split discourse, the questions and concerns - about governance, about citizenship, about regulation, about cultural production and political negotiation - become invisible. Like the buildings, which get guised in digital cloaks, the questions that pressingly need to be asked but are always postponed, also get cloaked in the rhetoric of development propelled by ICTs and globalisation. In a city that was constructed to eternally deflect attention, ownership or voices, how does one begin to scratch at the surfaces (Literally and figuratively) to search for something more than narratives of consumption, solipsist self-gratification, and self-congratulatory development?

It is with this agenda, in this city, torn and marked and seamlessly stitched by technology, that I start to unravel my questions about Internet and Society in China, trying to look at relationships between technologies, city spaces and identities, drawing from seven months spent at the Centre for Contemporary Studies at the Shanghai University. These stories, written with retrospective memory and embellished by the privilege of hindsight, posit a set of questions about Internet technologies, construction of city spaces, and manifestation of identities in China, but especially in Shanghai, to locate potentials of social transformation, political participation, engagement and discourse, which has not been transplanted on technology studies in China. In the process it also lays down a framework to understand how, in an oppressive or authoritarian regime, the cultural becomes the grounds upon which foundations of new political intervention and social change can be built.

This blog, in its ten different entries, relies on academic and popular discourse, semi-structured interviews, participant observation, field work, conversations, and personal experiences that I collected in my stay there, trying to deal with the double translations of culture and language. Whenever I have been unsure – and those moments have been many – I have tried to discuss and debate ideas with colleagues, friends, peers and participants, to ensure that the observations or arguments are qualified by more than just a neo-colonial meaning making sensibilities. Despite that rigour, if faults remain, they are all mine, and hopefully will serve as points of entry into a fruitful discourse.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/itcity

Fill The Gap: Global Discussion on Digital Natives

nishant — 2010-01-22T10:54:13Z

More often than not people don't understand the new practices inspired by Internet and digital technologies. As such a series of accusations have been leveled against the Digital Natives. Educators, policy makers, scholars, and parents have all raised their worries without hearing out from the people they are concerned about. Hivos has initiated an online global discussion about Digital Natives. So, to voice your opinion, start tweeting with us now #DigitalNatives.

If you cannot attend Fill The Gap, you can also join us in a global discussion on some of the issues being discussed at #DigitalNatives

1. Are you an apolitical consumer, or do you have ambitions?

http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNatives

2. Are you a little prince or princess, who only wants to talk to like minded people or are you different?

http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNativesPrincess

3. Is Wikipedia your bible or do you really know something?

http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNativesWiki

4. Are you a digital dinosaur? They say you don’t know anything about ICT!

http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalDinosaur

5. Why use the Internet, why don’t you march the streets?

http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNativesProtest

6. Plans to change the world? What do you need?

http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNativesChanceTheWorld

If you are in Amsterdam, here is the information you will need to attend the event:

Fill the Gap! - 7

R U Online?

Date: 15 January 2010

Time: 12.30 until 17.00 hour

Location: Het Sieraad, Postjesweg 1, Amsterdam

The seventh edition of Fill the Gap! is all about the power of youth and IT in developing countries. How can their skills be strengthened and put to use for a better world? Hivos, apart from cohosting the event, will be involving digital natives to hear their stories about ICT and engagement.

An Open Space event on the potential of new (mobile) media and youth in developing countries. For everyone in politics, the profit and the non-profit sectors who is interested in ICT and international development cooperation.

The use of new (mobile) technology is the most natural thing in the world for the youth of today.

Shaped by the digital era and at ease with creativeity, these innovators use new media to change the world. Just think of the Twitter revolution in Iran. What can the international development sector learn from this? How could international development cooperation use the potential power of youth to tackle development problems?

The seventh edition of Fill the Gap! is all about the power of youth and IT in developing countries. How can their skills be strengthened and put to use for a better world? The kick-off will be hosted by Jennifer Corriero, co-founder of Taking IT Global: the international platform for youth and the use of new media for a better world. Then the floor is open to discuss your own ideas with people from new media, the business world and the international development sector during the Open Space sessions. Join in: come to Amsterdam on Friday January 15th and be inspired during Fill the Gap!

Registration is free. The programme is in English.

» Fill the Gap

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/grants/digital-natives-with-a-cause/dntweet

The Digital Other

nishant — 2015-05-14T12:07:42Z

Based on my research on young people in the Global South, I want to explore new ways of thinking about the Digital Native. One of the binaries posited as the Digital ‘Other’ -- ie, a non-Digital Native -- is that of a Digital Immigrant or Settler.

I am not comfortable with these terms and they probably need heavy unpacking if not complete abandonment. Standard caricatures of Digital Others show them as awkward in their new digital ecologies, unable to navigate through this brave new world on their own. They may actually have helped produce digital technology and tools but they are not ‘born digital’ and hence are presumed to always have an outsider’s perspective on the digital world order.

As I’ve interacted with young people in the Global South, one thing suddenly started emerging in dramatic fashion -- that many of the youth working extensively with digital technologies in emerging ICT contexts often shared characteristics of the Digital Other. In countries like India, where the digital realm became accessible and affordable to certain sections of the society as late as 2003, there is a learning curve among youth that does not necessarily match the global thinking on Digital Natives. Even though these young people might be considered Digital Natives, because they are at the center of the digital revolution in their own countries, there is no doubt they are also Digital Others relative to Global North and West conceptions of young people in digital networks.

There is a very popular tweet that was making the rounds recently, which suggested that Digital Natives don’t have an account of the digital just like fish don’t have a theory of water -- they take to the digital as fish take to water. In this analogy lies a very important distinction between Digital Others and Digital Natives. Out of necessity, Digital Others have a relationship of production, control and design with the technologies they work with. They have a critical engagement with technology, as they code, hack, design, and create protocols and digital environments to suit their needs and resources. Digital Natives, on the other hand, have a purely consumption based interaction with the technology they use.

I want to repeat that. The Digital Natives I’ve observed have a purely consumption based interaction with the technologies they use. I know this sounds weird in the face of widespread perceptions that Digital Natives have participatory, engaged, intuitive relationships with technology. We are supposed to be living in prosumer times, where the user on the Infobahn is a consumer and producer of information. But Web 2.0 entities like Facebook have created a business where the user is not just consuming but indeed the user is the consumed. While Facebook and Twitter revolutions are interesting in how users have been able to ‘abuse’ information censorship and create new communities of political protest, we still have to remember that the technologies that supported these revolutions were closed, proprietary, and coercive -- often even putting users in danger.

From my perspective and my research, we have conflated access to information with access to technology, and we have misread this increased access as a sign of intimate relationship with digital technology and the Internet. However, for many youth, media production and information sharing are actually merely forms of consumption.

What is most alarming to me is that the individual’s relationship with original production and design of technology is on the decline. More and more, technology platforms and apps that Digital Natives interact with are closed hardware and software systems. Private corporations produce and shape the tools of interaction, producing seductive interfaces and information engagement choices that make opaque the actual working of the technologies we use. I am concerned that, increasingly, Digital Natives are acting as pure consumers of technology and gadgets, and seem willing to do so.

Banner image credit: World Bank Photo Collection http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldbank/3492673512/

Nishant wrote the original blog post in DML Central. Read it here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/the-digital-other

A provisional definition for the Cultural Last Mile

nishant — 2011-08-02T08:57:07Z

In the first of his entries, Ashish Rajadhyaksha gives his own spin on the 'Last Mile' problem that has been at the crux of all public technologies. Shifting the terms of debate away from broadcast problems of distance and access, he re-purposes the 'last mile' which is a communications problem, to make a cultural argument about the role and imagination of technology in India, and the specific ways in which this problem features in talking about Internet Technologies in contemporary India.

In its classical form, the ‘last mile’ is a communications term defining the final stage of providing connectivity from a communications provider to a customer, and has been used as such most commonly by telecommunications and cable television industries. There has however been a a specific Indian variant, seen in its most classical avatar in scientist Vikram Sarabhai’s contention that overcoming the last mile could solve the two major challenges India has faced, of linguistic diversity and geographical distance, and mounted as the primary argument for terrestrial television in the early 1980s. (I will try and attach the Sarabhai paper a little later to this posting).

This specifically Indian variation, where technology was mapped onto developmentalist-democratic priorities, has been the dominant characteristic of communications technology since at least the invention of the radio in the 1940s. For at least 50 years now, that means, the last mile has become a mode of a techno-democracy, where connectivity has been directly translated into democratic citizenship. It has continuously provided the major rationale for successive technological developments, from the 1960s wave of portable transistors, the terrestrial transponders of the first televisual revolution it the early 1980s (the Special Plan for the Expansion of Television), the capacity of satellite since SITE and the INSAT series, and from the 1990s the arrival of wired networks (LANs, Cable, fibre-optic) followed by wireless (WLAN, WiMAX, W-CDMA). At each point the assumption has been consistently made that the final frontier was just around the corner; that the next technology in the chain would breach a major barrier, once and for all.

What I hope to do is to provide a historical account to argue that the theory of the ‘last mile’ has been founded on fundamental (mis)apprehensions around just what this bridge constitutes. Further, that these apprehensions may have been derived from a misconstruction of democractic theory, to assume, first, an evolutionary rather than distributive model for connectivity, and second, to introduce a major bias for broadcast (or one-to-many) modes as against many-to-many peer-to-peer formats. The book, whenever I succeed in writing it, will hope to argue the following:

1. It has been difficult to include human resource as an integral component to the last mile. Contrary to the relentlessly technologized definition of the last mile, it may perhaps be best seen historically as also, and even perhaps primarily, a human resource issue. This is not a new realization, but it is one that keeps reproducing itself with every new technological generation[1], with ever newer difficulties. The endemic assumption, derived from the broadcasting origins of the definition is that it is primarily the sender’s responsibility to bridge the divide, that technology can aid him to do so on its own, and that such technology can negate the need to define connectivity as a multiple-way partnership as it reduces the recipient into no more than an intelligent recipient of what is sent (the citizen model). On the other hand, it is possible to show how previous successful experiments bridging the last mile have been ones where recipients have been successfully integrated into the communications model both as peers and, even more significantly, as originators as well as enhancers of data. Importantly, this paper will show, this has been evidenced even in one-way ‘broadcast’ modes such as film, television and radio (in the movie fan, community radio and the television citizen-journalist).

2. The one-way broadcast versus peer-to-peer versus two/multiple-way debate needs to he historically revisited. The need to redefine the beneficiary of a connectivity cycle as a full-fledged partner tends to come up against a bias written into standard communications models – and therefore several standard revenue models – that consistently tend to underplay what this paper will call the significant sender/recipient. While both terrestrial and satellite systems require some level of peer-to-peer transmission systems to facilitate last-mile communications, it has been a common problem that unless either a clear focus exists on geographic areas or significant peer-to-peer participation exists, broadcast models inevitably find themselves delivering large amounts of S/N at low frequencies without sufficient spectrum to support large information capacity. While it is technically possible to ‘flood’ a region in broadcasting terms, this inevitably leads to extremely high wastage as much of the radiated ICE never reaches any user at all. As information requirements increase, broadcast ‘wireless mesh’ systems small enough to provide adequate information distribution to and from a relatively small number of local users, require a prohibitively large number of broadcast locations along with a large amount of excess capacity to make up for the wasted energy.

This problem, importantly, springs as much from a built-in ideological commitment to one-way broadcasting formats, as from technological limitations. The technology itself poses further problems given the bias of different systems to different kinds of connectivity, and with it different types of peer-to-peer possibilities. Rather than attempting a one-size-fits-all model for all models to follow, we need to work out different synergies between broadcast-dependent and peer-to-peer-enabled platforms.

This book will eventually hope to study the history of peer-to-peer and multiple-way structures as systems where sending has become a component part of receiving. Key technological precedents to the present definition of the sender-communication ‘partner’ would be community radio, low-power transmission-reception systems (most famously the Pij experiment in Gujarat conducted by ISRO), and various internet-based networking models.

3. The need to revisit the technological community is therefore critical. The key question is one of how technological communities have been produced, and how they may be sustained. In January 2007, the attack by V.S. Ailawadi, former Chairman, Haryana Electricty Regulatory Commission, on India’s public sector telecom giants BSNL and MTNL for keeping their ‘huge infrastructure’ of ‘copper wire and optic fibre’ to themselves, when these could be used by private operators as cheaper alternatives to WiMAX, W-CDMA and broadband over power lines, shows the uneasy relationship between new players and state agencies. Mr. Ailawadi’s contention that the ‘unbundling’ of the last mile would bring in competition for various types of wireless applications and broadband services not just for 45 million landlines but also for 135 million mobile users of various service providers, also therefore needs to be revisited from the perspective of community formation. How would the new 135 million mobile users be effectively tapped for their capacity to become what we are calling significant senders?

In defining the last mile as to do with the recipient-as-sender, and thus the community, this paper will focus on a history of community action along specific models of connectivity. These are: cinema’s movie fan, internet’s blogger and networker, solar energy’s barefoot engineer, software’s media pusher and television’s citizen-journalist. A specific focus for study will be the models of participatory learning in the classroom, using film, the vinyl disc, the audio cassette, the radio, the television, the web and now the mobile phone.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/definiton

Collaborative Projects Programme

nishant — 2011-08-23T03:04:56Z

The Centre for Internet and Society recognises collaboration and consultation as its primary mode of engaging with research and intervention. The Collaborative Projects Programme (CPP) is CIS’ platform for partnering (intellectually, logistically, financially, and administratively) with other organisations, individuals and practitioners in projects which are of immediate concern to the work that CIS is committed to.

The Collaborative Projects Programme also expands the scope of research to produce a synergy between research and praxis. The CPP is, in many ways, the in-house research that CIS undertakes, in collaboration and consultation with other organisations, institutions and individuals who have a stake and a say in the field of Internet and Society. The CPP is not bound by any theme of programmatic modalities and is envisioned more as a way for CIS to extend its field and establish a strong network with other exciting spaces in the Global South.

The Collaborative Projects Programme can include, but is not limited to, organising of large conferences or workshops; developing tools for better research and advocacy; data mining towards a specific goal that complements CIS’ vision; producing original monographs/publications/books targeted at different audiences; experimenting with new technologies to affect policy and usage; implementing pilot studies and instances of existing ideas; developing schemes to integrate education and technology; public intervention and awareness campaigns geared towards particular outcomes; celebrating certain aspects of internet technologies; engaging with digital natives; and creating new environments of learning and participation online.

The CPP is NOT a grant making programme. However, we are interested in partnering on new and innovative ideas and would welcome conversations with people and organisations in the field. If you have an interesting idea that you think fits our larger vision, please contact us and we can begin the discussions.

List of Projects under the Collaborative Projects Programme:

1. The Promise of Invisibility: Technology and the City - A seven month research project initiated by Nishant Shah, in collaboration with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Shanghai University, enabled by a grant from the Asia Scholarship Foundation, Bangkok.

2. Disability, Learning and Digital Participation - in partnership with Inclusive Planet

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/grants/collaborative-projects-programme

i4D Interview: Social Networking and Internet Access

nishant — 2011-09-22T12:51:57Z

Nishant Shah, the Director for Research at CIS, was recently interviewed in i4D in a special section looking at Social Networking and Governance, as a lead up to the Internet Governance Forum in December, in the city of Hyderabad.

Mechanism of Self-Governance Needed for Social Networks

Should social networking sites be governed, and if yes, in what way?

A call for either monitoring or censoring Social Networking Sites has long been proved ineffectual, with the users always finding new ways of circumventing the bans or the blocks that are put into place. However, given the ubiquitous nature of SNS and the varied age-groups and interests that are represented there, governance, which is non-intrusive and actually enables a better and more effective experience of the site, is always welcome. The presumed notion of governance is that it will set processes and procedures in place which will eventually crystallise into laws or regulations. However, there is also another form of governance - governance as provided by a safe-keeper or a guardian, somebody who creates symbols of caution and warns us about being cautious in certain areas. In the physical world, we constantly face these symbols and signs which remind us of the need to be aware and safe. Creation of a vocabulary of warnings, signs and symbols that remind us of the dangers within SNS is a form of governance that needs to be worked out. This can be a participatory governance where each community develops its own concerns and addresses them. What is needed is a way of making sure that these signs are present and garner the attention of the user.

How do we address the concerns that some of the social networking spaces are not "child safe"?

The question of child safety online has resulted in a raging debate. Several models, from the cybernanny to monitoring the child's activities online ,have been suggested at different times and have more or less failed. The concerns about what happens to a child online are the same as those about what happens to a child in the physical world. When the child goes off to school, or to the park to play, we train and educate them about things that they should not be doing -- suggesting that they do not talk to strangers, do not take sweets from strangers, do not tell people where they live, don't wander off alone -- and hope that these will be sufficient safeguards to their well being. As an added precaution, we also sometimes supervise their activities and their media consumption. More than finding technical solutions for safety online, it is a question of education and training and some amount of supervision to ensure that the child is complying with your idea of what is good for it. A call for sanitising the internet is more or less redundant, only, in fact, adding to the dark glamour of the web and inciting younger users to go and search for material which they would otherwise have ignored.

What are the issues, especially around identities and profile information privacy rights of users of social networking sites?

The main set of issues, as I see it, around the question of identities, is the mapping of the digital identities to the physical selves. The questions would be : What constitutes the authentic self? What is the responsibility of the digital persona? Are we looking at a post-human world where online identities are equally a part of who we are and are sometimes even more a part of who we are than our physical selves? Does the older argument of the Original and the Primary (characteristics of Representation aesthetics) still work when we are talking about a world of 'perfect copies' and 'interminable networks of selves' (characteristics of Simulation)? How do we create new models of verification, trust and networking within an SNS? Sites like Facebook and Orkut, with their ability to establish looped relationships between the users, and with the notion of inheritance (¨friend of a friend of a friend of a friend¨), or even testimonials and open 'walls' and 'scraps' for messaging, are already approaching these new models of trust and friendship.

How do we strike a balance between the freedom of speech and the need to maintain law and order when it comes to monitoring social networking sites?

I am not sure if the 'freedom of speech and expression' and the 'maintaining of law and order' need to be posited as antithetical to each other. Surely the whole idea of 'maintaining law and order' already includes maintaining conditions within which freedom of speech and expression can be practiced. Instead of monitoring social networking sites to censor and chastise (as has happened in some of the recent debates around Orkut, for example), it is a more fruitful exercise to ensure that speech, as long as it is not directed offensively towards an individual or a community, needs to be registered and heard. Hate speech of any sort should not be tolerated but that is a fact that is already covered by the judicial systems around the world.

What perhaps, is needed online, is a mechanism of self-governance where the community should be able to decide the kinds of actions and speech which are valid and acceptable to them. People who enter into trollish behaviour or hate speak, automatically get chastised and punished in different ways by the community itself. To look at models of better self-governance and community mobilisation might be more productive than producing this schism between freedom of speech on the one hand and the maintenance of law and order on the other.

Link to original article on i4donline.net

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/i4d-interview-social-networking-and-internet-access

Digital Natives : Talking Back

nishant — 2015-05-15T11:50:19Z

One of the most significant transitions in the landscape of social and political movements, is how younger users of technology, in their interaction with new and innovative technologised platforms have taken up responsibility to respond to crises in their local and immediate environments, relying upon their digital networks, virtual communities and platforms. In the last decade or so, the digital natives, in universities as well as in work spaces, as they experimented with the potentials of internet technologies, have launched successful socio-political campaigns which have worked unexpectedly and often without precedent, in the way they mobilised local contexts and global outreach to address issues of deep political and social concern. But what do we really know about this Digital Natives revolution?

Press Release

Youth are often seen as potential agents of change for reshaping their own societies. By 2010, the global youth population is expected reach almost 1.2 billion of which 85% reside in developing countries. Unleashing the potential of even a part of this group in developing countries promises a substantially impact on societies. Especially now when youths thriving on digital technologies flood universities, work forces, and governments and could facilitate radical restructuring of the world we live in. So, it’s time we start listening to them.

Because of the age bias and the dependence of a large section of Digital Natives around the world, on structures of authority, there has always been a problem of power that has restricted or reduced the scope of their practice and intervention. For younger Digital Natives, Parental authority and the regulation from schools often becomes a hindrance that thwarts their ambitions or ideas. Even when they take the initiative towards change, they are often stopped and at other times their practices are dismissed as insignificant. In other contexts, because of existing laws and policies around Internet usage and freedom of expression, the voices of Digital Natives get obliterated or chastised by government authorities and legal apparatuses which monitor and regulate their practices. The workshop organised at the Academia Sinica brings in 28 participants from contested contexts – be it the micro level of the family or the paradigmatic level of governance – to discuss the politics, implications and processes of ‘Talking Back’.

What does it mean to Talk Back? Who do we Talk Back against? Are we alone in our attempts or a part of a larger community? How do we use digital technologies to find other peers and stake-holders? What is the language and vocabulary we use to successfully articulate our problems? How do we negotiate with structures of power to fight for our rights? These are the kind of questions that the workshop poses. The workshop focuses on uncovering the circuitous routes and ways by which Digital Natives have managed to circumvent authorities in order to make themselves heard. The workshop also dwells on what kind of support structures need to be developed at global levels for Digital Natives to engage more fruitfully, with their heads held high and minds without fear, with their immediate environments.

The proceedings of the first workshop in Taipei, 16-18th August, 2010 are available at http://digitalnatives.in/

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

Political is as Political does

nishant — 2011-08-04T10:30:51Z

The Talking Back workshop has been an extraordinary experience for me. The questions that I posed for others attending the workshop have hounded me as they went through the course of discussion, analysis and dissection. Strange nuances have emerged, certain presumptions have been questioned, new legacies have been discovered, novel ideas are still playing ping-pong in my mind, and a strange restless excitement – the kind that keeps me awake till dawning morn – has taken over me, as I try and figure out the wherefore and howfore of things. I began the research project on Digital Natives in a condition of not knowing, almost two years ago. Since then, I have taken many detours, rambled on strange paths, discovered unknown territories and reached a mile-stone where I still don’t know, but don’t know what I don’t know, and that is a good beginning.

The researcher in his heaven, all well with the world

This first workshop is not merely a training lab. For me, it was the extension of the research inquiry, and collaboratively producing some frames of reference, some conditions of knowing, and some ways of thinking about this strange, ambiguous and ambivalent category of Digital Natives. The people who have assembled at this workshop have identified themselves as Digital Natives as a response to the open call. They all have practices which are startlingly unique and simultaneously surprisingly similar. Despite the great dissonance in their geo-political contexts and socio-cultural orientations, they seem to be bound together by things beyond the technological.

Each one chose a definition for him/herself that straddles so many different ideas of how technologies interact with us; there are writers who offer a subjective position and affective relation to technologies and the world around them; there are artists who seek to change the world, one barcode at a time; there are optimist warriors who have waged battles against injustice and discrimination in the worlds they occupy; there are explorers who have made meaning out of socio-cultural terrains that they live in; there are leaders who have mobilized communities; there are adventurers who have taken on responsibilities way beyond their young years; there are researchers who have sought higher grounds and epistemes in the quest of knowledge. The varied practice is further informed by their own positions as well as their relationship with the different realities they engage with.

How, then, does one make sense of this babble of diversity? How does one even begin to articulate a collective identity for people who are so unique that sometimes they are the only ones in their contexts to initiate these interventions? Where do I find a legacy or a context that makes sense of these diversities without conflating or coercing their uniqueness? This is not an easy task for a researcher, and I have struggled over the two days to figure out a way in which I can start develop a knowledge framework through which I can not only bring coherence to this group but also do it without imposing my questions, suggestions or agendas on you. And it is only now, at a quarter to dawn, as I think and interact more with the different digital natives that things get shapes for me – shapes that are not yet clear, probably obscured by the blurriness of sleep and the rushed time that we have been living in the last few days – and I now attempt to trace the contours if not the details of these shapes.

Questioning the Question

The first insight for me came from the fact that the Digital Natives in the workshop talked back – not only to the structures that their practice engages with, but also the questions that I posed to them. “What does it mean to be Political?” I has asked on the first day, knowing well that this wasn’t going to be an easy dialogue. Even after years of thinking about the Political as necessarily the Personal (and vice versa), it still is sometimes difficult to actually articulate the process or the imagination of the Political. It is no wonder that so many people take the easy recourse of talking about governments, judiciaries, democracies and the related paraphernalia to talk about Politics.

I knew, even before I posed the question, that this was going to lead to confusion, to conditions of being lost, to processes of destabilising comfort zones. However, what I was not ready for was a schizophrenic moment of epiphany where I tried to ask myself what I understood as the Political. And as I tried to explain it to myself, to explain it to others, to push my own knowledge of it, to understand others’ ideas and imaginations, I came up with a formulation which goes beyond my own earlier knowledges. There are five different articulations of the legacies and processes of the Political that I take with me from the discussions (some were suggested by other people, some are my flights of fancy based on our conversations), and it is time to reflect on them:

Political as dialogue

This was perhaps, the easiest to digest because it sounds like a familiar formulation. To be political is to be in a condition of dialogue. Which means that Talking Back was suddenly not about Talking Against or Being Talked To. It was about Talking With. It was a conversation. Sometimes with strangers. Sometimes with people made familiar with time. Sometimes with people who we know but have not realised we know. Sometimes with the self. The power of names, the strength of being in a conversation – to talk and also to listen is a condition of the Political. In dialogue (as opposed to a babble) is the genesis of being political. Because when we enter a dialogue, we are no longer just us. We are able to detach ourselves from US and offer a point of engagement to the person who was, till now, only outside of us.

Political as concern

This particular idea of the political as being concerned was a surprise to me. I have, through discourses and practice within gender and sexuality fields, understood affective relationships as sustaining political concerns and subjectivities. However, I had overlooked the fact that the very act of being concerned, what a young digital native called ‘being burned’ about something that we notice in our immediate (or extended) environments is already a political subjectivity formation. To be concerned, to develop an empathetic link to the problems that we identify, is a political act. It doesn’t always have to take on the mantle of public action or intervention. Sometimes, just to care enough, is enough.

Political as change

This is a debate that needs more conversations for me. Politics, Knowledge, Change, Transformation – these are the four keywords (further complicated by self-society binaries) that have strange permutations and combination. To Know is to be political because it produces a subjectivity that has now found a new way of thinking about itself and how it relates to the external reality. This act of Knowing, thus produces a change in our self. However, this change is not always a change that leads to transformation. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake can often be indulgent. Even when the knowledge produces a significant and dramatic change, often this change is restricted to the self.

When does this knowing self, which is in a condition of change, become a catalyst for transformation? When does this knowing-changing translate into a transformation for the world outside of us? Just to be in a condition of knowing does not grant the agency required for the social transformation that we are trying to understand. Where does this agency come from? How do we understand the genesis and dissemination of this agency? And what are the processes of change that embody and foster the Political?

Political as Freedom

On the first thought, the imagination of Political as Freedom seemed to obvious; commonsense and perhaps commonplace. However, I decided put the two in an epistemological dialogue and realised that there are many prismatic relationships I had not talked about before I was privy to these conversations. Here is a non-exhaustive list: Political Freedom, Politics of Freedom, Free to be Political, Political as Freedom, Freedom as Political... is it possible to be political without the quest of freedom? Is the freedom we achieve, at the expense of somebody else’s Political stance? How does the business of being Political come to be? Not Why? But How? If Digital Natives are changing the state of being political what are they replacing? What are they inventing? Where, in all these possibilities lies Freedom?

Political as Reticence

We all talked about voice – whose, where, for whom, etc. It was a given that to give voice, to have voice, to speak, to talk, to talk back were conditions of political dialogue and subversion, of intervention and exchange. So many of us – participants or facilitators – talked about how to speak, what technologies of speech, how to build conditions of interaction... and then, like the noise in an otherwise seamless fabric of empowerment came the idea of reticence. Is it possible to be silent and still be political? If I do not speak, is it always only because I cannot? What about my agency to choose not to speak? As technologies – of governance, of self, and of the social constantly force us to produce data and information, through ledgers and censuses and identification cards – make speech a normative way of engagement, isn’t the right of Refusal to Speak, political?

Sometimes, it is necessary to exercise silence as a tool or a weapon of political resistance. The non-speaking subject holds back and refuses to succumb to pressures and expectations of a dominant erstwhile, and in his/her silence, produces such a cacophony of meaning that it asks questions that the loudest voices would not have managed to ask.

The Beginning of a Start; Perhaps also the other way round

These are my first reflections on the conversations we have had over the two days. I feel excited, inspired, moved and exhilarated as I carry myself on these flights of ideation, thought and conceptualisation. It is important for me that these are questions that I did not think of in a vacuum but in conversation and dialogue with this varied pool of people who have spent so much of their time and effort to not only make their work intelligible but also to reflect on the processes by which we paint ourselves political. I have learned to sharpen questions of the political that I came with and I have learned to ask new questions of Digital Natives practice. I don’t have a definition that explains the work that these Digital Natives do. But I now have a framework of what is their understanding of the political and what are the various points of engagement and investment.

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

Change has come to all of us

nishant — 2012-03-13T10:43:38Z

The general focus on a digital generational divide makes us believe that generations are separated by the digital axis, and that the gap is widening. There is a growing anxiety voiced by an older generation that the digital natives they encounter — in their homes, schools and universities and at workplaces — are a new breed with an entirely different set of vocabularies and lifestyles which are unintelligible and inaccessible. It is time we started pushing the boundaries of what it means to be a digital native.

In this connected world, the geek is everyone — from a grandma on Skype to a teen on Second Life.

Two self-proclaimed digital natives, on a cold autumn morning in Amsterdam, decided to leave the comforts of their familiar virtual worlds and venture into the brave new territories of real-life shopping. Though slightly confused by the lack of click-and-try options and perplexed by the limitations of the physical spaces of shopping, we plodded along, shop after shop, thinking how much easier it is to chat on IM while flying through Second Life as opposed to face-to-face interactions while walking on crowded streets. After we had run out of shops (and patience), we decided that it was time to rely on better resources than our own wits. The Dutch girl fished out her Android smartphone and with the single press of a button, opened up channels of information. She called her mother. She asked for the location of the store that was eluding us. And then she looked at me in silence before bursting into laughter. Her 64-year-old mother, in response to our question, had said, “Why don’t you just Google it?”

We spent five minutes in stunned laughter when we realised that we should have instinctively done that and that we were being asked by somebody from Generation U to “get with it”. Funny (and slightly embarrassing) as it is, it brings into focus, the question, “Who is a digital native?” For those of you who have been reading this column, it has been defined in terms of age and usage. A digital native is generally somebody young, somebody who is tech-savvy, somebody who can perform complicated calisthenics with digital technologies — throwing virtual sheep, having instant relationships, writing complex stories and pirating their favourite movies — in one nonchalant click of the mouse. However, these kinds of digital natives are only stereotypes.

If we move away from these descriptions of novelty, of excitement and of youth, a different kind of digital native emerges for us. A digital native is somebody whose way of thinking (about himself and the world around) is significantly informed because of the presence of and familiarity with the internet and digital technologies. In other words, a digital native is a person who has experienced (and is often led to) change because of their interactions with new technologies.

It can be a middle-aged man whose business changed when he started tracking his supplies using complex and sophisticated databases. It can be a mother of two, finding support and help raising her children on online communities like Bing. It can be a senior teacher re-discovering pedagogy through distributed knowledge systems on Wikipedia. It can be grandparents who interact with their grandchildren over Skype and text messaging, across international borders and lifestyles. It can be a mother telling her digital native daughter to “just Google it!” over the cellphone.

And as things might be, Shamini, my 15-year-old bonafide digital native correspondent from Ahmedabad, recently wrote that she got off Facebook and deleted her account. “It felt like I had retired from a job,” she said. But she was away from Facebook only for four months, dissociated from all the “time, energy and drama that it caused” and was quite enjoying it. After four months of self-imposed exile, she, however, resurfaced on Facebook. And it was to stay in touch with her aunt and uncle, who live in faraway lands, and cannot keep in touch with her unless she is on Facebook. Shamini was surprised at this. After spending much time convincing them about trying to use email and phones to keep connected, she finally gave in and started a new account that nobody knows of. And she asked me the important question: Who is the digital native now?

My grandmother used to tell us, “Nobody is born knowing a language.” I think it is time to start applying the same logic here. Nobody is born with technologies. But there are people — perhaps not yet a generation, but still a population — who are changing their lives and significantly transforming the world by turning Google and Facebook and Twitter into verbs and a way of doing things. So the next time, somebody asks you if you know a digital native, don’t look for somebody out there — it might just be you!

The original column can be read in The Indian Express

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/change-has-come

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

Digital Natives with a Cause?

nishant — 2015-05-15T11:31:14Z

Digital Natives With A Cause? - a product of the Hivos-CIS collaboration charts the scholarship and practice of youth and technology with a specific attention for developing countries to create a framework that consolidates existing paradigms and informs further research and intervention within diverse contexts and cultures.

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore and Hivos have assessed the state of knowledge on the potential impact of youth for social transformation and political engagement in the South. This report ‘Digital Natives with a Cause?’ charts the scholarship and practice of youth and technology and informs further research and intervention within diverse contexts and cultures.

The report displays that digital natives have a potential impact as agents of change. It concludes that multidisciplinary theoretical approaches venturing beyond the cause-and-effect model and providing the necessary vocabulary and sensitivity are crucial to understanding Digital Natives. The lament that youths are apolitical is a result of insufficient attention to activities that do not conform to existing notions of political and civil society formation. Digital Natives are sensitive and thoughtful. It is time to listen to them and their ideas, and to focus on their development as responsible and active citizens rather than on their digital exploits or technologised interests.

The report specifically focuses on youth as e-agents of change within emerging information societies to explore questions of technology mediated identities, embedded conditions of social transformation and political participation, as well as potentials for sustained livelihood and education. It identifies the knowledge gaps and networks and further areas of intervention in the field of Digital Natives.

As a first step in working towards enabling Digital Natives for social transformation and political engagement, Hivos and CIS will organize a Multistakeholder Conference Fall 2010.

A summary of the report, as well as the detailed narrative are now available for discussion, debate, suggestions and ideas.

Digital Natives with a Cause? - Report Download Pdf document Here

Digital Natives with a Cause? - Report Summary Download Pdf document Here

The report is also available at http://http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause/News/New-Publication-on-Digital-Natives

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

Digital Natives at Republica 2010

nishant — 2015-05-15T11:35:48Z

Nishant Shah from the Centre for Internet and Society, made a presentation at the Re:Publica 2010, in Berlin, about its collaborative project (with Hivos, Netherlands) "Digital Natives with a Cause?" The video for the presentation, along with an extensive abstract is now available here.

Abstract:

As a growing population in emerging Information Societies, particularly in Asia, experience a lifestyle mediated by digital technologies, there is also a correlated concern about the young digital natives constructing their identities and expressions through a world of incessant consumption, while remaining apathetic to the immediate political and social needs of their times. Governments, educators, civil society theorists and practitioners, have all expressed alarm at how the digital natives across the globe are so entrenched in practices of incessant consumption that they have a disconnect with the larger external reality and contained within digital deliriums. They discard the emergent communication and expression trends, mobilisation and participation platforms, and processes of cultural production as trivial or unimportant. Such a perspective is embedded in a non-changing view of the political landscape and do not take into account that the Digital Natives are engaging in practices which might not necessarily subscribe to the earlier notions of political revolution, but offer possibilities for great social transformation and participation.

The oldest Digital Native in the world – if popular definitions of Digital Natives are accepted – turned 30 this year, whereas the youngest is not yet born. In the last three decades, a population has been growing up born in technologies, and mediated their sense of self and their interactions with external reality through digital and internet technologies. These interactions lead to significant transitions in the landscape of the social and political movements as the Digital Natives engage and innovate with new technologies to respond to crises in their local and immediate environments. However, more often than not, these experiments remain invisible to the mainstream discourses. The mechanics, aesthetics and manifestation of these localised and contextual practices hold the potentials for social transformation and political participation for the future. This presentation looks at three different case studies to look at how, through processes and productions which have largely been neglected as self indulgent or frivolous, Digital Natives around the world are actively participating in the politics of their times, and also changing the way in which we understand the political processes of mobilisation, participation and transformation.

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

Survey : Digital Natives with a cause?

pushpa — 2011-08-04T10:35:43Z

This survey seeks to consolidate information about how young people who have grown up with networked technologies use and experience online platforms and tools. It is also one of the first steps we have taken to interact with Digital Natives from around the world — especially in emerging information societies — to learn, understand and explore the possibilities of change via technology that lie before the Digital Natives. The findings from the survey will be presented at a multi-stakeholder conference later this year in The Netherlands.

The Centre for Internet and Society, in collaboration with Hivos' Knowledge Programme, launched the "Digital Natives with a Cause?" Programme in 2008. After the initial study (click here for a free download), we are now gathering responses from young users of technology to help us understand, document and support different practices aimed at social transformation and political participation more efficiently.

We believe that the world is changing very fast and that the rise of Internet technologies has a lot to do with it. As young users of technology (as opposed to young users who use technology) adopt, adapt and use these new technologised tools to interact with their environment, new ways of effecting change emerge. This survey is an attempt to capture some of the information which gives us an insight into who the people are, using these technologies, the ways in which they use them and what their perceptions and experiences are.

The survey will not take more than 7 minutes of your time but it will help us get a better sense of the way things are.

Please click here so start the survey.

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