Centre for Internet and Society

Digital Natives with a Cause? - Workshop in Chile seeks participants

praskrishna — 2011-04-01T16:50:30Z

The third and final workshop in the Digital Natives with a Cause? research project will take place in Santiago, Chile, from the 8 to 10 February. An open call for participation follows.

As the Internet and digital technologies become more widespread, the world is shrinking: we are constantly connected to our contexts, our people, our cultures and our networks. And you, yes YOU are a part of this change. In fact, as a digital native– someone to whom digital technologies are central to life – you are directly affecting the lives of many, sometimes even without knowing about it.

The Centre for Internet and Society and Hivos in collaboration with Rising Voices is calling out to young users of technology to join a global conversation. The 3-day workshop titled “From Face to Interface” will focus on how youth utilize new platforms, media and spaces of communication and expression in the digital age. If you have used digital technologies to make your voice heard, to express your opinion in creative ways or to create new knowledge online, we want to hear from you. These can be stories where you have used a mobile phone, GPS or PDA to access the Internet and reduce the online-offline divide, stories where you accessed interactive platforms like user-generated content websites, stories where the use of technology has become part of your identity, or stories where you have been part of a collaborative method of research, production, shared learning process, participation network etc.

We invite you to share your perspectives in an informal conversation along people with similar approaches from neighboring communities. The workshop is open to applicants from, in and around Latin America and the Caribbean who are interested in an interactive and engaging dialogue that marks the beginning of the “Digital Natives with a Cause?” research inquiry into the region.

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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/dn-workshop-in-chile

Digital Natives with a Cause?

praskrishna — 2012-06-22T05:05:40Z

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Digital Natives Video Contest Voting

praskrishna — 2012-01-31T05:22:35Z

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Digital Natives Video Contest

praskrishna — 2015-05-08T12:35:27Z

The Everyday Digital Native Video Contest has its top five winners through public voting.

A Day in the Life of a Digital Native: Story scripted, shot and edited by Leandra (Cole) Flor. The video is an extension of Cole's photo essay "Mirror Exercises" conceptualized for 'Digital AlterNatives with a Cause' Book 1 To Be. Download the book.

Top 5 winners of the Digital Native video contest selected through public votes. From left to right: Marie Jude Bendiola, T.J. KM, Thomas Burks, John Musila and MJ.

The Jury Prize for Two Best Videos goes to John Musila (Kenya) and Marie Jude Bendiola (Singapore)! Congratulations to all winners. The Top 5 winners win the grand prize of EUR 500 each!

Our Top 10 contestants: Click on their profile to watch their videos

	Marie Jude Bendiola I come from a third world country where technology seemed to be hard to reach back in the 90s; especially by the not-so-privileged. As we progressed, technology has not only become ubiquitous (in malls, various institutions and technological hubs) but also, it has come to be used by the common man. My video will answer how technology bridges the gap between dreams and reality. It will be a fusion of documentary and re-enactment of real life events and dramas. Read More
	Cijo Abraham Mani The power of digital media will be presented to audience with the help of showing tweet-a-thon panel discussions, blood aid tweets getting spread, etc. Read More
	TJ K.M. My video explores the spiritual aspect of digital technology and how rather than getting in the way of our spiritual expression, it is actually bringing us face to face with it, if only we choose to look. The video will be a mixture of live action and stop motion animation/puppetry where digital devices take on a transcendent character similar to nature spirits in various cultures. I plan to investigate the tendency to exclude digital devices and technology from being categorized alongside nature as if it is somehow exempt from or superior to this category. Using symbolism and motifs from various cultures such as the Native American Hopi, Balinese Hinduism and Japanese Shintoism, my video will create a world where the technology we use daily is viewed not just as a means for socio-cultural exchange and communication but is available for the nurturing of our souls if we so choose. Read More
	Thomas Burks We have a small production company in Birmingham, Alabama. I was hired on a year ago to do film and commercials for them as they expand into advertising and video coverage of events. We only have about 3 employees including myself, working out of our homes. We recently acquired a space to open a studio and retail location downtown where we live. We use Facebook, blogs, and viral marketing all the time to get our name out there. Our account executive is constantly monitoring our Facebook for client orders and bookings. We are beginning to use twitter to provide information more fluidly to people. We believe this might be a year of growth for our small company, as we are becoming able to provide much higher quality content. We're fully digital; constantly updating our websites and blogs, and I believe we would be able to tell a great digital story. We submit numerous small films and skits; we cover awesome concerts, and rely so heavily on the digital world to show our content. That will be the gist of our video. Read More
	John Musila Map Kibera Trust is an organization based in Kenya’s Kibera slums. Using digital gadgets and technology, they have transformed the community by placing it on the map as it was only seen as forest when viewed on a map. They also film stories around the community and share them with the world on their YouTube channel and other social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Through this they have been able to highlight and raise awareness about the challenges the community faces. Our video would show Kibera’s role in bringing about change. Read More
	Andrés Felipe Arias Palma I think many people are digital natives unknowingly. Being a digital native is a relationship with activism and society, not as they initially thought. It was a condition of being born in specific times and external factors. In the video, I will interview people about who and what is a digital native? How to use the Internet? What are the advantages and disadvantages for society where everything is run with the power of the Internet? Read More
	Martin Potter Over a period of nearly four years, moving across small towns in Australia and South East Asia, I have seen the most extraordinary innovations at a local community level. My video will focus on these local stories with global impact. I am pursuing a PhD in participatory media and this will lend a uniquely academic perspective on the concept of collaboration, community life and innovation. Read More
	E. James Rajasekaran I live in the temple town of Madurai in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. I am a social worker and the plight of people living in slims is something that my NGO is closely associated with. My video will bring out the efforts of the people who live in the slums of Madurai. Read More
	Anand Jha Bangalore is home to a lot of technology start-ups. A lot of geeks, who find it limiting to work for corporations, are driving a very open source-oriented, frugally-built and extremely demanding culture. While their products are standing at the bleeding edge of technology, their personal lives too are constantly driven on the edge, every launch being a make or break day for them. The project would aim at capturing their stories, their frustration and motivation, looking at the possibilities of Indian software scene moving beyond the services and back-end office culture into a more risk prone but more passionate business of technology. Read More
	MJ As a digital native living in a developing country, I have carried out a series of both online and offline projects, which have always striven to benefit Zimbabweans in a number of ways since 2000. These projects have greatly increased my interactions with computers. I might say, I got married to a computer in 2000 when I bought my first PC; in a way, my relationship with my computer is intimate. Even though this computer I bought is an old 386 machine made obsolete by the faster Pentium III models, this did not change my love for the computer. My video will focus on a dream-like moment of my digital life. Read more

Jury Members

Shashwati Talukdar Shashwati Talukdar grew up in India where her engagement with theatre and sculpture led to filmmaking, and a Masters degree from the AJ Kidwai Mass Communication Research Center in Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She developed an interest in American Avant-Garde film and eventually got an MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University, Philadelphia (1999). Her work covers a wide range of forms, including documentary, narrative and experimental. Her work has shown at venues including the Margaret Mead Festival, Berlin, Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Kiasma Museum of Art and the Whitney Biennial. She has been supported by entities including the Asian Cine Fund in Busan, the Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts among others.
Leon Tan Leon Tan, PhD, is a media-art historian, cultural theorist and psychoanalyst based in Gothenburg, Sweden. He has written on art, media, globalization and copyright in journals such as CTheory and Ephemera, and curated media-art projects and art symposia in international sites such as KHOJ International Artists’ Association (New Delhi, 2011), ISEA (Singapore, 2008) and Digital Arts Week (Zurich, 2007). He is currently researching media-art practices in India, and networked museums as an expanded field of cultural memory making.
Jeroen van Loon Jeroen, digital media artist, investigates the (non-) impact of digital technology on our lives. For two months he went analogue, refrained from connecting to the World Wide Web, and communicated through his Analogue Blog. He is currently working on Life Needs Internet in which he travels around the world and collects people's personal handwritten internet stories.
Becky Band Jain Becky Band Jain is a non-profit communications specialist and blogs on everything from technology to psychology and culture. She spent the last five years living in India and she’s now based in New York. She’s a dedicated yoga and meditation practitioner and is passionate about ICTD and new media.
Namita A. Malhotra Namita A. Malhotra is a legal researcher and media practitioner and a core member of Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore, India. Her areas of interest are image, technology, media and law, and her work takes the form of interdisciplinary research, video and film making and exploring possibilities of recombining material, practice and discipline. She is also a founder member of Pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive) which is a densely annotated online video archive.

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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/digital-natives-contest

Digital Natives Santiago Workshop Schedule

praskrishna — 2011-08-23T04:22:59Z

pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/publications/workshop-schedule

Digital Natives Research Project Coordinator

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T12:48:41Z

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, in collaboration with Hivos Netherlands, is looking for a Research Project Coordinator to help develop a knowledge network and coordinate international workshops for the project "Digital Natives with a Cause?"

The job profile is as follows:

Coordinating international workshops in liaison with regional partners to produce content for a book mapping technology mediated interventions by young people in different parts of the world.
Developing a knowledge network of stakeholders in emerging Information Societies in the Global South, to document debates, discussions and ideas in the field of Digital Natives.
Working closely with academic researchers, scholars, and practitioners in the development sector to develop content for an international website on Digital Natives.
Supervise and coordinate the production of the Digital Natives research in print and digital content.
Strategise and execute dissemination, design and collaboration strategies for developing the Digital Natives research areas.
Supervising intellectual and financial logistics for the project.

The candidate should be below 35 years of age and have fluent familiarity with digital platforms, trends, fashions and activities. Excellent communication and planning skills and the ability to work sensitively with partners in different countries and contexts are expected.

Candidates with an advanced degree in Sociology, Culture Studies, Communication and Management, with experience in international programme/project management within the development sector or those working in the field of youth-politics/youth-technology with experience in international collaborative projects will be given preference.

The job is based in Bangalore but requires a fair amount of international travel for logistical and substantial coordination. The position will open in May and is full-time. The position will be supported by two Project Associates who shall be selected in consultation with the Research Project Coordinator.

Consolidated consultation fees will be in the range of 34,000 -- 45,000 Rupees per month commensurate with experience. International travel and per diem will be provided based on established CIS standards.

Send in applications in SOFT COPY ONLY, along with an updated CV and samples of writing or project deliverables to nishant@cis-india.org by the 25th of April 2010. The Digital Natives with a Cause? Report is available on the CIS website for further reference at http://www.cis-india.org/publications/cis/nishant/dnrep.pdf/view

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/research-coordinator

Digital Natives Podcast

praskrishna — 2012-02-15T04:18:30Z

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Digital Natives Newsletter (May 2012)

praskrishna — 2012-07-06T08:51:23Z

Digital Natives newsletter of May 2012.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/dn-newsletter-may-2012.pdf

Digital Natives Logo

praskrishna — 2011-11-14T06:02:12Z

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

praskrishna — 2012-04-03T07:15:23Z

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

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

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

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

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

praskrishna — 2012-04-03T08:36:19Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digital Native: Twin Manifestations or Co-Located Hybrids

praskrishna — 2011-12-23T04:36:40Z

Samuel Tettner reviews ‘Digital Natives and the Return of the Local Cause’ from Book 1: To Be. The essay is authored by Anat Ben-David.

Ben-David’s piece is a well-articulated and informed attempt to resolve two of the several conceptual fuzziness of the term “Digital Native”. She attempts this in a philosophical manner: trying to move away from the ontological “who are Digital Natives?” to an epistemological “when and where are Digital Natives?” Her reasoning is that this perceptive change will allow us to unpack the duplicity of a hybrid term and to understand if it refers to a unique phenomenon in the world worth exploring.

To answer the when and the where, Ben-David situates the term into its constituencies: digital and native, contextualizing the words using two approaches; historiographical (when) for the digital and geopolitical (where) for the native.

The digital is semantically pin-pointed in the short but active history of information technology within an activism framework, to use a broad word. The author then places two events side to one: First the 1999 manifestations against World-trade Organization protests in Seattle and then the 2011 Tahir Square protests in Egypt. Are these two phenomena different in nature? Is Tahir Square a more technologically advanced version of Seattle? Are the basic mechanisms the same, albeit with new faces and shinier phones?

Ben-David postulates three reasons for placing the manifestations on a different trajectory. First, “The Internet” of 1999 and “The Internet” of 2011 are distinctively not the same thing. The second is that the demographic constituting the protest are not the same: in 1999 they were mostly Civic Society Organization (CSO) employees and volunteers, while in Tahrir they were mostly civilians and concerned citizens connected through their local networks.

The third concerns the spatial and symbolic nature of the protests. In Seattle, the protests were against large transnational corporations; Seattle was chosen because it hosted the World Trade Organization that year. In Egypt, the protest was directed against local corruption and concerned itself with local governance issues. Tahir Square was chosen because the protests were directly about, of and in Egypt.

Which brings us to the where. The ‘Native’ is used by Ben-David to refer to the ongoing structural shifts towards localized activism campaigns. This change came with the growing realization that transnational activism campaigns that tried to effect change across loosely cohesive cross-sections of the world, tended to lose touch with their points of origin and remain in suspended animation. Local campaigns seem to be more responsive and agile, specially in their ability to enter into dialogues with the needs of local populations. The spontaneity of action, the granular level of the causes, and the lowered threshold of the agents and initiators are some of the aspects Ben-David sees in emergent campaigns, which are critically different from activism campaigns in the past.

Of course, the location and the time intertwine eventually. A growing trend in the development of the digital world has been the localization of frameworks, methodologies and approaches. The author’s use of Richard Roger’s four stages of the evolution of politics about the web is outstanding: It shows us without telling us that the distinction between when and where is purely analytical and that they really are a single entity of the time-space continuum.

Ben-David succeeds in contextualizing both the digital and the native as different sides of the same coin: as two manifestations of the growth and maturation process that technology-mediated activism has been through over the last 10 years. The result is an internally-consistent perspective which sees Digital Natives habituating hybrid-timespaces alongside heterogeneous actors, where the relationship between the local and the global is contingent, transitory, dynamic – and knowledge can be transformed and adapted to fit actors and their causes.

This review is part of the Tweet-a-Review event organized by the ‘Digital Natives with a Cause? Project and is republished here from Samuel Tettner’s blog.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/twin-manifestations

Digital Native Video Contest Announcement

praskrishna — 2012-03-13T11:07:53Z

The Centre for Internet & Society and Hivos Knowledge Programme are pleased to announce the Everyday Digital Native (Digital AlterNatives) Video Contest.

The Everyday Digital Native is hiding inside each of us.

You THINK Digital.
You CONNECT using digital devices and gadgets.
You ACT Digitally, always clicking, linking, tagging and Liking.
You know what it means To Be Digital. It's simply a way of life!
Tell us your Digital Story. What makes your life so click-worthy?

Submit your proposal via Online Application Form (https://www.research.net/s/BZXQPHL) by 26 January 2012

WINNING PRIZE: EUR 500 each for TOP 10 VIDEO FINALISTS!!

Selection Process

Round 1: Contest entries closes on 26 January
Round 2: The jury will shortlist 20 entries
Round 3: The 20 shortlisted participants send in their final videos by 10 March
Round 4: Public voting for Top 10 videos. Voting closes: 31 March 2012.
Top 10 Finalists win EUR 500 each!
Round 5: Jury Selects Top 2 Winners: 10 April

Submission Guidelines

Use this Online Application Form to submit your proposals
Participants wishing to submit a sketch(es), storyboard, collage or short video narration at the proposal stage can send in their submissions to digitalnatives@cis-india.org. Please ensure your submission is accompanied by a brief explanatory write-up.
For team / group submissions, it is enough for one team member to fill the online form / submit proposal via email on behalf of the team.
The Digital AlterNatives with a Cause books are the inspiration for this video contest. You can use any of the essays as a basis for your video.
File type: AVI, MP4 formats
Language: Please send proposals / fill the online form in English. The final videos can be in any language, with English subtitles.
Title: Each proposal should feature a tentative title, short description of what the video will feature (characterization, storyline) and the theme and idea behind the video.
Genre: Do mention the style of execution / genre: animation, claymation, stick drawings stitched together in Movie Maker, paper art on video, documentary, short film, promotional message, and other styles of digital movie making.
Contact Details: Be sure to include your name and contact email, your city of residence and a two-liner on what you do to give us a perspective on your video.
Limit your written proposals to 350-500 words, although there’s no word limit strictly.
Your video shouldn’t exceed 30 minutes in run time, so fine-tune your ideas and storyboard accordingly
Every applicant is allowed only one proposal. No multiple story submissions.
Applicants can work individually or in a pair or a group. Each group will be permitted one entry submission.
All submissions must be original and clearly attributed to the relevant copyright holder. If referenced from third-party sources or if work is licensed under Creative Commons, please mention so.

Jury Members

Shashwati Talukdar Shashwati Talukdar grew up in India where her engagement with theatre and sculpture led to filmmaking, and a Masters degree from the AJ Kidwai Mass Communication Research Center in Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She developed an interest in American Avant-Garde film and eventually got an MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University, Philadelphia (1999). Her work covers a wide range of forms, including documentary, narrative and experimental. Her work has shown at venues including the Margaret Mead Festival, Berlin, Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Kiasma Museum of Art and the Whitney Biennial. She has been supported by entities including the Asian Cine Fund in Busan, the Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts among others.
Leon Tan Leon Tan, PhD, is a media-art historian, cultural theorist and psychoanalyst based in Gothenburg, Sweden. He has written on art, media, globalization and copyright in journals such as CTheory and Ephemera, and curated media-art projects and art symposia in international sites such as KHOJ International Artists’ Association (New Delhi, 2011), ISEA (Singapore, 2008) and Digital Arts Week (Zurich, 2007). He is currently researching media-art practices in India, and networked museums as an expanded field of cultural memory making.
Jeroen van Loon Jeroen, digital media artist, investigates the (non-) impact of digital technology on our lives. For two months he went analogue, refrained from connecting to the World Wide Web, and communicated through his Analogue Blog. He is currently working on Life Needs Internet in which he travels around the world and collects people's personal handwritten internet stories.
Becky Band Jain Becky Band Jain is a non-profit communications specialist and blogs on everything from technology to psychology and culture. She spent the last five years living in India and she’s now based in New York. She’s a dedicated yoga and meditation practitioner and is passionate about ICTD and new media.
Namita A Malhotra Namita A. Malhotra is a legal researcher and media practitioner and a core member of Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore, India. Her areas of interest are image, technology, media and law, and her work takes the form of interdisciplinary research, video and film making and exploring possibilities of recombining material, practice and discipline. She is also a founder member of Pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive) which is a densely annotated online video archive.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/video-contest-event-original

Digital Knowledge

praskrishna — 2014-08-22T00:43:17Z

Digital Knowledge

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Digital India: Did Modi get it wrong in Silicon Valley?

praskrishna — 2015-10-18T04:44:52Z

A bear hug, a photo filter and a new debate on net neutrality - Ayeshea Perera examines the domestic fallout of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Facebook townhall in US.

This was published by BBC News on October 16, 2015. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

It was supposed to be a moment that rocked the virtual world. Mr Modi, widely acknowledged as one of the world's most influential politicians on social media, enveloped a slightly stunned Mark Zuckerberg in a bear hug.

But what was it that really happened in Menlo Park? Why did some people think Mr Modi wasn't acting in India's best digital interests when he hugged Mr Zuckerberg?

India with an internet population of 354 million - which has already grown by 17% in the first six months of 2015 - is an obvious target for not only Facebook, but other Silicon Valley giants. And they have all been more than happy to pledge their support for digital India - a recently launched government initiative aimed at reinvigorating an $18bn (£11.6bn) campaign to strengthen India's digital infrastructure.

Google offered to provide 500 railway stations with free WiFi and Microsoft pledged to connect 500,000 Indian villages with cheap broadband access.

Digitally colonised?

But this huge show of support and the increased interest in India has caused some concern within the country.

"Is Digital India going to only make India a consumer of services offered by global tech companies in lieu of data? Personal data is the currency of the digital world. Are we going to give that away simply to become a giant market for a Facebook or a Google? Look at the way the tech world is skewed. Only China has been able to come up with companies that can take on these MNCs" Prabir Purkayasta, chairman of the Society for Knowledge Commons in India, told the BBC.

"The British ruled the world because they controlled the seas," he said. "Is India going to be content to just be a digital consumer? To being colonised once again?"

And in the aftermath of the Facebook townhall in particular, some talk has begun to surface about what Mr Zuckerberg's real India ambitions are.

Soon after the townhall ended, both Mr Modi and Mr Zuckerberg declared their support for digital India by using a special Facebook filter to tint their profile pictures in the tri-colour of the Indian flag.

Multitudes of Indians followed suit and timelines were awash with snazzy tinted profile pictures, all in support of "Digital India".

'Innocent mistake'

But then a tech website released what it claimed to be a portion of Facebook's source code, which allegedly "proved" that the "Support Digital India" filter was actually a "Support Internet.Org" filter.

Facebook quickly issued a denial, blaming the text in the code on an "engineer mistake" in choosing a shorthand name he used for part of the code.

But the "mistake" which has been coupled with a huge advertising blitz for Internet.Org across television channels and newspapers has raised suspicion about Facebook's motives. A Facebook poll on Internet.Org that frequently appears on Indian user timelines has also been ridiculed for not giving users an option to say no.

Instead the answer options to the poll question "Do you want India to have free basic services?" are "Yes" and "Not now".

Internet.org (now called free basics), aims to extend internet services to the developing world by offering a selection of apps and websites free to consumers.

Facebook's vice-president of infrastructure engineering, Jay Parikh has described the initiative as an "attempt to connect the two-thirds of the world who do not have access to the Internet" by trying to solve issues pertaining to affordability, infrastructure and access.

When Facebook launched the initiative in India in February, it was criticised by Indian activists who expressed concerns that the project threatened freedom of expression, privacy and the principle of net neutrality.

On the other end of the debate, Indian columnist Manu Joseph wrote in the Hindustan Times newspaper, hitting out at the "selfish" stand on net neutrality. He said concerns over the issue should be "subordinate to the fact that the poor have a right to some Internet".

Wrong signal

A massive campaign by India's Save the Internet Coalition exhorting Indians to speak out against initiatives threatening net neutrality caught public imagination and saw more than a million emails to India's regulator, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), demanding a free and fair internet in the country. Internet.Org was one of the initiatives immediately affected.

TRAI since released a draft policy on net neutrality, but a question that has been asked is whether it was appropriate for Mr Modi to visit Facebook given that the policy was still under consideration.

Mr Purkayasta is of the opinion that it could have been avoided. "It was not the time or the place to go. Even if it was simply a publicity gimmick, it still sends a signal to officials involved in drafting the policy," he said.

However, Sunil Abraham from the Centre for Internet and Society told the BBC he believed that while Facebook's intentions were suspect, Mr Modi's visit had the potential to safeguard net neutrality in India.

"India is a hugely important market for Facebook, and the prime minister has the power to force positive changes to its policies," he said. "We gain nothing by shutting them out."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/bbc-october-16-2015-digital-india-did-modi-get-it-wrong-in-silicon-valley

Centre for Internet and Society

Digital Natives with a Cause? - Workshop in Chile seeks participants

Digital Natives with a Cause?

Digital Natives Video Contest Voting

Digital Natives Video Contest

Our Top 10 contestants: Click on their profile to watch their videos

Jury Members

Digital Natives Santiago Workshop Schedule

Digital Natives Research Project Coordinator

Digital Natives Podcast

Digital Natives Newsletter (May 2012)

Digital Natives Logo

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

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

Digital Native: Twin Manifestations or Co-Located Hybrids

Digital Native Video Contest Announcement

Selection Process

Submission Guidelines

Jury Members

Shashwati Talukdar

Leon Tan

Jeroen van Loon

Becky Band Jain

Namita A Malhotra

Digital Knowledge

Digital India: Did Modi get it wrong in Silicon Valley?

Digitally colonised?

'Innocent mistake'

Wrong signal