Centre for Internet and Society

Open Access Day Flyer

sunil — 2008-10-31T09:24:39Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/publications/content-access/open%20access%20day%20flyer.pdf

Open Access Day celebrated in India

sunil — 2011-08-18T05:06:01Z

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore and the Centre for Culture, Media and Governance co-organised joint celebrations of Open Access Day in Jamia Millia Islamia campus on the 14th of October 2008. Around 50 people attended the event from different departments in Jamia there were also some participants from the Indian Linux Users Group. CIS also published an Open Access flyer on this day featuring quotations from Sam Pitroda, MS Swaminathan, Peter Suber, Alma Swan, Frederick Noronha, Barbara Kirsop and Samir Brahmachari.

Speaking at Tagore Hall at Jamia Millia Islamia, Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, pointed out that “there are over 25,000 scientific journals published in the world today but even the richest university in India cannot afford to subscribe to more than 1,200 journals. It is as though, Indian scientists and students are competing in a race with their legs bound.” Prof. Arunachalam called upon the student community to lobby for Open Access mandates for research outputs funded by tax-payers.Open Access is the principle that publicly funded research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication. October 14, 2008 was the world’s first Open Access Day. The founding partners for this Day are SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science, USA. According to the Directory of Open Access Journals – India publishes 105 Open Access journals.

Speaking at the celebrations at Jamia, Dr. Zakir Thomas of Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) traced the limited historical role that IPR has played in the development for drugs for Tuberculosis. Dr. Thomas is the project director of Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD), a project of CSIR. The government of India has already committed Rs. 150 crores to the OSDD project which is targeting neglected diseases from developing countries. Dr. Thomas also introduced the OSDD project and spoke about alternative systems of incentives that are more appropriate in the academic community such as attribution, citation and collaboration – all closely linked career growth in an academic or university context.

Dr. Lynn, a professor at the Department of Bio-informatics at JNU and Dr. Bhardwaj Scientist CSIR introduced the OSDD web platform and pointed out to various improvements over existing methods of research. While in peer-reviewed papers readers are only provided with reference number when experiments are discussed – on the OSDD platform readers can access the complete experiment details, including data even for failed experiments. This is critical in reducing wastage of valuable resources and efforts in attempting to re-invent the wheel.

Dr. Bhardwaj pointed out that she was already collaborating with students from the Jamia Millia Islamia campus on her projects hosted on OSDD. She said that the open access and open source models gives rise to many new collaborations both at the local and international level. Dr. Bhardwaj also announced that two CSIR open access journals were being launched by Dr. Samir Brahmachari - Director General on the occasion of World Open Access day.

Prof. Arif Ali, Head Dept. of Bio-Technology, Jamia Milia Islamia who presided over the meeting spoke of the challenges faced by faculty and students in the Indian context. Some international journals demand Rs. 40,000 from the authors in spite of assigning copyright. He predicted that the open access movement will lead to more Indian authors being published and cited. He also hoped that open access would become a norm instead of a novelty.

Download Open Access Flyer

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-access-day-celebrated-in-india

Open Access Day

sunil — 2011-04-05T04:45:17Z

October 14, 2008 will be the world’s first Open Access Day. The founding partners for this Day are SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science.

The Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, and the Cente for Internet and Society, Bangalore, request your presence at the celebrations of the first Open Access Day. Speaker include Prof. Andrew Lynn, Department of Bio-informatics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, Distinguished Fellow, Centre for Internet and Society.

Venue: Tagore Hall, Dayar-i-Mir Taqi Mir, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.

Agenda

About Open Access Day

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/publications/content-access/open-access-day

Open access conference seeks to free research

sachia — 2011-04-02T16:10:58Z

Article by Amulya Gopalakrishnan in the Indian Express (New Delhi), 26 March 2009

When Newton famously remarked that if he had seen further than others, it was by “standing on the shoulders of giants”, he wasn’t just being modest. He was stating the simple fact that knowledge builds on previous knowledge, that the back and forth of ideas is vital for scientific achievement. Though the current proprietory publishing model is stacked against scholars, an emerging open access movement across the world aims to free scientific content - and India has big stakes in it.

A conference in New Delhi brought together open access evangelists including Prof. John Willinsky of Stanford University, Prof Leslie Chan of the University of Toronto, Prof Surendra Prasad of IIT Delhi, Dr D K Sahu of MedKnow Publications, and Narendra Kumar of CSIR.

Now, all research papers published from CSIR labs will be made open access, either by putting the full text on freely available institutional repositories or publishing directly in open access journals. Meanwhile, across the world, MIT has become the first university to throw open all its research papers through the online repository software DSpace.

Globally, academic tenure and promotion is traditionally linked to research published in reputed, peer-reviewed journals. These journals are owned by commercial behemoths like Springer and Reed Elsevier, who own stables of journals in various disciplines, and dictate terms to university libraries. But in recent years, journal prices have shot through the roof.

Now, after years of weary negotiation, and empowered by new digital infrastructure, universities are teaming up via free institutional repository systems, to pool and circulate their collective research. In India, institutes like NIT Rourkela have adopted super-archives like DSpace for another reason — to showcase their scientific output to global peers. “NIT doesn’t have the research legacy of IIT or IISC — they needed the visibility,” says NIT director Sunil Kumar Sarangi.

Such a knowledge commons is especially valuable to developing countries — for instance, in agricultural research or public health, it is inexcusable that countries which could benefit most from the scientific debate are left out of the loop, simply because of prohibitive pricing (some journals cost up to 20,000 dollars, annually). This only widens the gulf between the state of research here and the US or Europe.

Even research produced in India with our taxpayer money is sent to big-name commercial journals and all copyright signed away, putting it out of reach for the Indian scholarly community. But all that could change if open access journals become the norm. S K Sahu, who runs MedKnow publications (over 80 open access journals), also busted claims that content on such journals tends to vanish into the ether after a few years online.

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To read the article at the Indian Express website, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/open-access-conference-seeks-to-free-research

Open Access Champion Leslie Chan Delivers Five Talks in India

praskrishna — 2013-01-02T05:35:22Z

Professor Leslie Chan, a champion of Open Access (OA) and Associate Director of the Centre for Critical Development Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough visited Tiruvananthapuram and Mysore in December 2012 for a series of lectures. Well known advocate for OA in India and the developing world, Professor Subbiah Arunachalam, accompanied him on these tours.

Leslie gave five talks in over three days at the Department of Library & Information Science, University of Kerala, on the morning of December 17, at the National Institute of Interdisciplinary Science & Technology, CSIR on the afternoon of December 17 at the Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management – Kerala on Decemeber 18 followed by a discussion with Satish Babu, President of the Computer Society of India and Director of ICFOSS in the afternoon, a talk at Manasa Media Centre, Mysore University Library on December 19, and a talk at SDM Institute for Management Development on December 20, 2012, which was more of a discussion.

Speaking on “Opportunities for Knowledge Management in the Open Access Environment” at the Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management–Kerala, Leslie Chan said, “the recognition of what constitutes scholarship is still very narrow and the quality of the content is secondary. It is the brand of the journal that is still the driving force behind every western journal.” He further said that there was a tension brewing among open access, quality control and the means of measuring impact. Market forces had infiltrated the realm of knowledge as well, for it was the companies that were increasingly taking over journals that were originally published by scholarly societies.[1]His presentation touched upon what is OA and its key benefits, growth of OA in the last ten years, and opportunities for information and library professionals. See the presentation slides below.

At the Mysore University Library, Leslie gave a lecture on Emerging Trends in Scholarly Communications and Impact Measures in the Open Knowledge Environment. He dealt with the key issues of changing contexts of research discovery and dissemination in the digital environment, why greater openness is good for science, the tensions between openness, quality measures, impact and policies, collaboration and competition, interdisciplinary research, deluge of research data. Prof. Chan touched upon some key problems like the broken scholarly communication system, emerging tools not being used effectively to serve scholarship, and the need to re-design scholarly communications and impact measures. See the presentation slides below.

Emerging Trends in Scholarly Communication and Impact Measures in the Open Knowledge Environment from University of Toronto Scarborough

Therafter, Prof. Chan visited Shri Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara Institute for Management Development and addressed scientists, librarians and academicians. There were discussions on how open access journals and repositories can help improve the visibility of an institution's research strengths, help attract research collaborators for authors and increase the return on investment. Prof. Chan was particularly critical of the current trends, in evaluating both researchers and their institutions using impact factor of journals in which they publish their research papers as the yardstick. Read the press coverage by Star of Mysore (PDF, 462 Kb).


Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam accompanied Prof. Leslie in his tours to Tiruvananthapuram and Mysore

Leslie's tour to Tiruvananthapuram and Mysore which saw him deliver a series of lectures along with open forum discussions has triggered a fresh awakening to seriously debate on open access initiatives. The event was well covered by the media with the Hindu doing an exclusive interview with him.[2]

More pictures of Prof. Chan's visit can be seen here.

[1]. See “Call for efforts to promote open access platforms, The Hindu, December 19, 2012, available at http://bit.ly/10LEiBU, last accessed on December 31, 2012.
[2]. See "In defence of Open Access systems", The Hindu, December 31, 2012, available at http://bit.ly/VZfmz6, last accessed on January 2, 2013.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/leslie-chan-gives-five-talks-in-india

Open Access

admin — 2009-07-07T09:49:12Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/homepage/access

Open Access

sumandro — 2015-11-16T13:18:23Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/access

Only 8.5pc of Wikipedia Editors are Women. How do we fix the Gender Gap on the Internet?

ting — 2017-02-09T02:49:47Z

Women-related articles are generally shorter, more prone to deletion, and more likely to be peripheral pieces under male-centric articles.

This was published by Your Story on February 7, 2017.

I was beginning an introduction session at a college in Vijayawada. While my audience (mostly female students) was giggling, I wrote down a simple question on the whiteboard:

“I see more men than women in _____”

The response was some more shy giggling until some students slowly raised their hands. “Sports!” “Technology companies!” “Conferences!” “In governments!” “…When I am in my class.” There is no denying that we all observe the underrepresentation of women at some points and occasions in our lives. However, it is much harder to imagine and notice that Wikipedia, the most used online encyclopaedia and the 7^th most visited website worldwide, also poses a problematic imbalance in its content and editor demographics.

In 2011, a survey carried out by the Wikimedia Foundation found that only 8.5 percent of Wikipedia editors were female. Since then, the awareness has risen; many have found the editor demographic imbalance is a strong reflection of what the encyclopaedia does or does not cover, how the written language and discourse were constructed on the pages, and how discussion flows on article talk pages[1].

For example, scholars discovered that women-related articles are generally shorter, more prone to deletion, and more likely to be peripheral pieces under male-centric articles. To elaborate, in the network structure of Wikipedia articles, women’s pages lack centrality as they often provide links and mention related male figures in their writing but not the other way around. A glass ceiling also exists for the notability criteria. The threshold for a woman to be “notable enough” (from the perspective of a male-dominant community) to deserve a Wikipedia page is higher than that of male figures. Thus, the lack of women editors and an already male-centric structure pose a threat not only to the diversity of content but also to the very definition of knowledge.

But why?

For years, the foundation and local communities have tried to discover the reasons behind the gender gap and solutions to it. Former Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner posted on her blog nine reasons that are off-putting for women when they edit Wikipedia.

The non-beginner-friendly editing interface
Lack of personal free time
Lack of confidence and self-efficacy
Unwillingness to stir up or participate in conflicts and edit wars
Feeling that their edits are “too likely to be reverted or deleted”
Misogynistic environment
“Wikipedia culture is sexual”
Being addressed as male in languages that have grammatical gender
Wikipedia is not as socialising or as welcoming as other websites

In India and other parts of the world, various reasons can also contribute to the problem. Awareness, for example, is the first barrier to be tackled. Many women did not know that Wikipedia is editable or that there are Indian language versions that they can contribute to. Internet access and facilities are a couple more reasons. In case someone does not have a personal computer, a woman is usually more cautious and skeptical when using a public internet café and staying out late. Similarly, families of young women editors can be more concerned about their daughters’ participation in men-organised/male-dominant communities, especially when there are offline (on-site) activities. The roots of the issue are not merely at the community level, but also sociopolitical and cultural.

Many events and initiatives have been carried out from local to global community levels. ‘Women in Red (WiR)’, for example, is a global initiative to bring more women-related articles online. It encourages editors to turn ‘red links’ (non-existing pages) into ‘blue links’ (existing Wikipedia page). The project has helped increase female biographies from 15 percent (November 2014) of total biographies on English Wikipedia to 16.75 percent (November 2016)[2]. In March, Wikipedia communities around the globe also celebrate ‘Women’s History Month’, when edit-a-thons (marathons for Wikipedia editing) are held to help create more women’s articles online as well as to recruit more female volunteers and spread awareness. However, is this enough?

“A new debate: what matters?”

As we are raising more awareness, integrating gender gap issues into the community’s strategy plans and coming up with more intervention ideas to reach more potential women editors, it is time to revisit the meaning behind the work. In my early research time, I was to believe that ‘retention rate’ (whether female participants will stay active after an event), ‘number of articles created’, and the ‘event continuation potentials’ are the key factors in determining whether an event can be called successful. But the ideas have slowly changed as I have got to reach more female participants.

As a matter of fact, Wikipedia is about voluntary contribution and negotiating for consensus in quality knowledge creation as well as maintaining a friendly and open environment for all. In other words, we can ‘nudge’ people into Wikipedia editing but we should not (and need not to) ‘push’ them to do it. Especially in the situation of a wide gender gap, we should not make women feel like they are tokenised in the process — that we are targeting them due to their gender and that they should contribute more because they are female, the minority. When asked about the existing problems in the current gender gap interventions, an active Wikipedian once explained to me:

“Say if you are writing the biography of someone then you should be familiar with and interested in that person’s work. That’s why sometimes those gender-specific edit workshops backfire... If you are creating a bio just because this person is a woman, then I think it is missing the whole point of Wikipedia.”

In my opinion and through discussions with several female Wikipedians, I have realised that there should be a new debate and investigation on how intervention goals should be set and what these actions’ long-term results would be. While focusing on the retention rate of a new Wikipedian after an intervention, we limit ourselves in the frame of time and numbers. We should, instead, understand more about new members’ experiences and feedback to pinpoint the good motivations and expected barriers for them. With this information, we should help establish the motivation in event follow-ups and to minimise their barriers as much as the community can. Secondly, article quality should be stressed upon —even if it takes more time to publish her/his first article, it is a much more fruitful learning experience to understand the responsibility of a Wikipedian. After all, low-quality articles not only do not contribute to Wikipedia content but also lead to more deletion, which can be a discouraging experience for those who are new.

For event continuation, we should guide the participants to community engagement and support them to carry out more event ideas that can suit their interests and goals. In short, it is about creating involvement, discussion, and a sense of community instead of continuously pushing events on our end and have the women be passive participants. When asked about how one can define a “successful gender gap-bridging event,” one of the active organisers told me:

“For me, it is when conversations are happening. It is when we have both men and women, and that we can openly have a discussion about the issue and the difficulties and how we want to see changes.”

To put it simply, I believe that we should look at experiences more than numbers, focus on quality more than quantity, and try to reach people (both men and women) to stimulate discussion more than being fixated on the contents needed to balance out the asymmetry.

How to fix the Wikipedia gender gap is never an easy question to ask, but what I am sure about is that Wikipedia and its communities should be empowering rather than result-oriented and that our learning still has a long way to go.

[1] A “talk page” is attached to each Wikipedia article (found on the top-left corner of an article), where editors can hold discussions and debates or leave comments during the editing process.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/your-story-ting-yi-chang-february-7-2017-only-8.5-percent-of-wikipedia-editors-are-women-how-do-we-fix-the-gender-gap-on-the-internet

Online privacy should not come at the cost of security: Sunil Abraham

praskrishna — 2014-11-02T02:27:12Z

Sunil Abraham, Centre for Internet and Society’s executive director, on privacy laws and Internet penetration.

Anirban Sen's article was published in LiveMint on May 19, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), a research thinktank that primarily focuses on issues of Internet governance, is pushing to revise the provisions of the Information Technology (IT) Act and make a stronger case for privacy laws and free speech in India, an issue that has caused widespread concern after the government tried to restrict access to more than a 100 websites last year with little justification.

“We want to revise the IT Act...that’s the toughest one and that’s not going to happen very soon because the government is treating it like an ego battle now. They no longer listen to the others,” said Sunil Abraham, executive director of CIS.

The IT Act has been at the centre of debate, with some of its provisions such as Section 66A, which criminalizes “causing annoyance or inconvenience” online or electronically, coming under criticism from rights advocates for being too vague and subject to interpretation.

CIS, which will complete five years on Monday and is organizing a four-day event focusing on issues such as cyber security, surveillance in India and privacy, said it also was working towards creating a privacy law for India within the next 3-4 years. India, which is estimated to have Internet penetration of just 10%, is the third-largest Internet market in the world.

“We’re getting closer and closer to that (privacy law),” said Abraham, adding that privacy should not come at the cost of security.

Over the past five years, Bangalore-based CIS has also been part of some government committees such as the Justice AP Shah Committee, which focused on privacy laws in India, and is also currently working on the country’s telecom policy. The non-government organization, which receives grants from international bodies such as the Wikimedia Foundation, has also worked on policies for the government of Iraq and is currently also doing policy work for the government of Burma.

“Five years ago we were making noise from outside the room, we were not inside any policy making space. That has also changed. From an organization that was mostly outside the room, we’re increasingly being trusted by our own government,” said Abraham, who was one of the most vocal critics of the government’s unique identification (UID) project when it was first launched. Abraham had raised concerns over its overtly broad scope and issues over privacy in the project.

For CIS, one of the biggest achievements over the past five years was being part of the policy framework for the government of India’s draft national policy on open standards for e-governance, said Abraham, adding that the organization was working towards increasing Internet penetration in the country, especially in rural areas.

“We’re hoping that every single mobile phone user in the country will become an Internet user. We’re planning for that future,” he said.

The CIS event starting on Monday will include speakers such as legal researcher and advocate Lawrence Liang and Vibodh Parthasarathi, an associate professor at the Centre for Culture, Media and Governance at the Jamia Millia Islamia university. Both Liang and Parthasarathi are members of the board at CIS.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/livemint-anirban-sen-may-19-2013-online-privacy-should-not-come-at-the-cost-of-security

One For All

nishant — 2013-03-04T04:13:06Z

The importance of making information accessible and universal.

Nishant Shah's column was published in the Indian Express on February 17, 2013.

In the late 1990s, when I was an undergraduate student studying English Literature, a professor asked me if I could volunteer to write exam papers for a student with visual impairment, Milind, who was one year my senior. It was my first encounter with a student with a visual challenge, and it changed my experience and understanding of education. I had always found comfort in the world of words and stories. When I first met Milind, I soon realised that he was being excluded from this world of reading and writing that I had taken for granted. With most of the prescribed textbooks not available in Braille and none of the reference material in libraries accessible, he was dependent on volunteers and disability support organisations to audio-record the texts so that he could access them. His library was made of audio-cassettes scratched from over-use, which did not offer him the options of re-visiting, annotating, and close-reading. And when I wrote the exams for him, writing as he dictated, I was left humbled and inspired by his strong commitment to educating himself. The phone call I received when he got his English Literature degree, and our celebratory dinner, remain one of my happiest memories as an undergraduate student.

That experience made me realise, for the first time the exclusivity of the world of books and print. While print and paper industries have helped democratise knowledge and provided us access to store and retrieve knowledge through ages and time, they are also technologies of exclusion. Reading has been so naturalised in our everyday life, that we have almost forgotten that it is a visual medium. A book is not easily accessible to people who do not have the privilege or capacity to be literate. A book can also exclude with jargon and dense languages, which are the stronghold of an elite few. And more than anything else, it stays, if you will excuse the pun, a closed book, to people with visual impairment.

Like many who might have encountered second-person disability, I have never done much to change our society. I might have done some volunteer work, or signed petitions for better infrastructure, but the interventions have been minimal and almost non-existent. I think about this today, because on February 7, 2013, one of the strongest and most powerful voices that has been fighting apathetic government systems, moribund policies and indifferent social attitudes towards visually challenged people, Rahul Cherian, died due to ill-health. Cherian, who was the co-founder of the Inclusive Planet Centre for Disability Law and Policy and a fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society, where I work, was a disability policy activist who realised the potential of the digital world, to make information and knowledge accessible to those who were previously discriminated against.

Cherian firmly believed that the digital interfaces would provide new access to information and knowledge to those who live with visual disability. If we implement global standards to ensure that the text on the internet can be read out loud by text-to-speech devices, we would have a new democratisation of information that allows people to engage with the Web. His spirit and enthusiasm was infectious as he resolutely worked at persuading technology developers and holding governments responsible for implementing accessibility protocols to make information in the digital age open.

He was committed to digitising printed resources in formats which allowed deeper engagement and manipulation of text through voice and keyboard-based controls. He fought against intellectual property right regimes which disallow books to be converted into formats that can be accessible to open source and free screen readers and text-to-speech engines. Cherian worked at collectively harnessing the powers of the digital towards building a just and inclusive society that made me recognise how deep-seated our blind spots are, when we look at the mainstream and the popular. His work made me understand that the battles for open knowledge and open access are not only economic in nature. That the digital book projects offer new inroads for those previously excluded, into the world of knowledge and information. I feel honoured to have shared conversations and working spaces with him, and know that his passing will leave a large hole, in the lives of those who knew him, as well as the political movement that demands better access for inclusion of people with disability.

Today, I want to take this moment of loss, to remind myself of something that sometimes gets forgotten — the digital technologies that we take for granted and often use just for fun, have a strong potential for social and political change. While it is great that the digital world has offered new spaces for content generation, information sharing, cultural production and social connection, it also has the potential to build safe, just and inclusive information societies. I don't know if we should buy into the rhetoric that the next global war is going to be around information, but we should remember that information is definitely worth fighting for and making accessible to all.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/indian-express-feb-17-2013-nishant-shah-one-for-all

Once Upon a Flash

nishant — 2008-11-03T20:25:38Z

The essay was published as a part of Sarai Annual Reader titled 'Turbulence' and explores the aesthetics, politics and form of the flashmobs and their manifestation in India. It looks at the potentials of the flashmob to produce turbulent physical spaces and identities and their encounter with legalities. The essay is also available at http://www.sarai.net/journal/06_pdf/03/04_nishant_shah.pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/Sarai%20turbulence.pdf

Once Upon A Flash

nishant — 2012-12-14T10:23:52Z

It was a dark and stormy evening. A young man in a dark blue Adidas jacket, collar turned up, eyes under green-black shades, hopped off a motorbike, tucked his thumbs into the front pockets of his low-slung retro jeans and surreptitiously made his way through a road thronging with rush-hour traffic and irate pedestrians yelping on their cellphones. He skipped across death traps with skilled ease: leaping over potholes, jumping over halfdug trenches, avoiding the occasional pair of doggy jaws that longed to mate with his ankles, ignoring the bikers who were using the pavements as new lanes for driving towards a honking traffic jam bathed in an orange and red neon that made the road look like a piece of burnt toast with dollops of vicious jam on it.

After five minutes of brisk walking, he slowed down as if he had reached just where he wanted to be – nowhere in particular. On his left were the large Acropolis buildings, towering over the world from their gated existence, structured in pompous Greek columns and facades of granite, stone and marble. On his right, on the other side of the road, if you looked over the metal head of the traffic, you could see the small roadside restaurant that announced fresh fish at cheap rates, sitting cosily under a starved-looking tree, happily encroaching upon the pavement, forcing the pedestrians to disembark, navigate the traffic and then come back to the relative safety of the footpath.

Caught between these two ironies, he stayed put for a while, glancing at his chor bazaar Rado model that flashed on his left wrist. He headed towards the mall that rose in glass and neon, false curves and studious lines across the quickly staining sky of a Saturday evening. As he walked into the mall, the automatic doors that sensed his corporeal presence opened up for him and the girl in a polka-dotted blue-and-red dress threw him the smile that desk attendants save for strangers. The gush of cold airconditioned air and the noises of window shoppers greeted him to ease; mannequins in windows, draped in the latest fashions and various states of undress, winked at him; the smell of freshly brewed coffee came and enveloped him. He headed with ungrim determination towards the round performance area in the mall centre. Like many other hangers-out he too loitered without apparent intent around it, just another boy out on a Saturday evening.

Suddenly his cell phone buzzed. His alarm sounded in loud tones to blend with the Britney Spears playing on the mall sound system. He fished out a bright bumblebee-yellow bandana and tied it to his head. As he did that, the performance area turned into a sea of people wearing varied shades of yellow, blasting their cell phone alarms at full volume till all you could hear was a grating disharmony that would have caused comment on a railway station in India. The phones soon faded and a group of about 70 people formed a human ring, holding hands, their heads swathed in yellow, and sang at the top of their voices the first two stanzas of Hum Honge Kamyaab – the Hindi rendering of the famous song We Shall Overcome. Once the song sank into a bewildered silence, the people in yellow bandanas fell on their knees, raised their hands towards heaven and roared with laughter before quickly pulling off their headgear and dispersing, leaving an empty space and a gawking audience who just had their first dose of a ‘flashmob’ – a group of people who assemble together, suddenly, in a public place, perform an unexpected sets of choreographed actions and disperse without as much as a by your leave or with your leave.

Flashmobs trace their history to the early 18th century industrialisation, when a group of women working in the labour shops[1]in Australia used coded messages to meet and discuss the problems they had in their workplaces. These meetings were organised at random, and the women used the very technologies of production that they engaged with at work on a daily basis to fight the oppression and the injustice of the people at the top. The first modern flashmob, however, is attributed to Bill Wasik, editor of Harper’s Magazine, who, after the first failed attempt (May, 2003), managed to pull a successful flashmob where 200 people swarmed over the mezzanine floor of the Manhattan departmental store Macy’s, pretending to buy a ‘love rug’ for their commune where they supposedly all lived together; they left a bewildered audience and a bemused store staff behind them (3rd June, 2003).

Organise, congregate, act, disperse – that is the anatomy of a flash mob. A polymorphous set of people are brought together through the commonality of subscribing to similar technological interfaces or gadgetry. Random e-mails, short messages (sms) on cell phones, discrete messages embedded in public works of art or media, blogs and wikis have now been successfully used to conjure these tenuous group formations that temporarily transform the space that they arrive at – flash sites – into something that neither the audience they perform to nor the state can comprehend, thus producing that space in a condition of social and physical illegality.

In The Name of Fun

One of the most overarching icons of a globalised economy has been the credit card – virtual money that has changed the way we think of money, capital and transactions. Visa Power, as the advertisement goes, is looked upon as the quintessential rhetoric of economic globalisation, where the power to change and to create is manifested through the processes of consumption. While technology has been heavily implicated in the creation of this new invisible money, it has remained on the background. The swiping of the card – the physical act of buying without ‘paying’ has become such a naturalised event that the technology it adopts or the networks it creates are not very visible... Flash mobs, in their construction, execution and ramifications, foreground technology as one of the most powerful tools of creating new formations of grouping and networking that, through their deliberately devised unintelligibility, transform the spaces they occupy.

This is the story of the first flashmob in India, and how it can be understood through the tropes of illegality, enchantment and transformation. The story starts a little before the flashmob itself. In the year 2000, a shopping mall in Mumbai created a furore amongst the public. It was the first ‘genuine’ shopping mall in India. The first space that claimed mallhood was in Bangalore – Kemp Fort, but it was more a large shopping store rather than a mall. This first all American shopping mall – Crossroads, with its promises of unlimited pleasure and brand-tagged shopping – attracted the largest crowd in its opening week. Everybody wanted to see what the mall was like. Everybody was curious about this space. Everybody wanted to be a part of this exclusive zone that clearly demonstrated that modernity and progress had finally come to us. Then everybody found out that they were not allowed to enter the mall. As the director of the mall pointed out in his interview with The Times of India, (23rd August, 2000), “Crossroads is not meant for everybody".

In those days when cell phones were still a novelty and definitely a curio for the upper classes, and when pagers were still struggling for a mass market, Crossroads passed a stipulation which restricted people not carrying a cell phone or a credit card from entering the mall. If you were still eager to enter the space, you paid extra fees of Rs 50 per head and thus made amends for not carrying a cell phone or a credit card. This was the first time a ‘public’ space made it very clear that the public it was looking for and attempting to effectively create was not “everybody”. The issue was talked about, shouted about, screamed at and criticised by all wings of the media, who passionately analysed this instance of discriminatory practices based on socioeconomics. Later, a PIL (Public Interest Litigation) was filed against the mall; it lost, and had to throw its doors open to “everybody” who had been clamouring to get in ever since they found out they were not allowed to enter.

On 4 October 2003, the mall again came into limelight in a manner it had not accounted for. This time it was initiated by an e-mail. About 5,000 original mailers went off to people all around Mumbai and even beyond the city, asking them to have a look at a new blog for Mumbai flashmobs. The blog posted a form asking for name, e-mail address and mobile number. On 3 October several cell phones rang, asking people who had submitted their details in the form to check their inboxes. The eager participants glided to their accounts to find a mail that agonisingly chalked out the time and space of the meeting venue – a flash site. The information was also sent by sms to all members who had volunteered. And then at exactly 5 pm a group of about a hundred participants entered Crossroads. They screamed at the top of their voices and sold imaginary shares belonging to Reliance India. They performed the garba. In the middle of dancing they all froze. And then without so much as a word, after two minutes of historic histrionics, they opened their umbrellas and dispersed, leaving a trail of bewilderment and confusion, as an audience of over a thousand watched with their jaws on the floor.

This was India’s first recorded flashmob. A large crowd of people who did not know each other, did not have any largely political purpose in mind and did not really intend to extend the flashmob contact into relationships, got together to perform a set of ridiculous actions at Crossroads, thus marking it as the first flash site in India. Ironically, the group that converted the mall into mayhem consisted of whom Anne Balsamo calls the hyperreal people – people whose identities are created by the hypervisual and extra physical aesthetics of the digital technologies that they deploy - who were once the only legitimate owners of the space of that mall. This first flashmob sparked off many others all around the nation – most of them marking out spaces such as multiplexes, shopping malls, gaming parlours, body shops, large commercial roads and shopping complexes as their flashsite.

Bill Wasik, the creator of the first flashmob in Manhattan, in a recent interview,[2] looked upon the flashmob experiment as a study in behavioural psychology of people he called “hipsters” – people who would join ‘new’ or ‘cool’ things for no reason or investment but to be visible in the new trends and social fads. To a large extent, Wasik’s surface analysis seems to hold true. While flashmobs have been used as a political weapon by several groups and activists in many areas of human rights, queer rights, feminism, political democracy, etc., flashmobs fundamentally exist, like pre-Raphaelite art, for a solipsist reason. Bijoy Venugopal, who produced one of the most celebrated accounts of the Crossroads flashmob[3], mentions how it was all about having some “serious fun”. Increasingly, the flashmob organisers in and around the country have disavowed any ideological moorings for the gathering, and forcibly shelve it into the realms of entertainment or leisure. Following the banning of flashmobs in cities like Mumbai and Bangalore (Mid-day, 9th oct. 2003), even though they have invoked the right to freedom of speech and expression, the organisers and the participants have largely produced justifications by claiming to have no political agenda or inclinations in the construction or execution of flashmobs.

In this repeated disavowal of the political, one can read the desire for re-enchantment that flashmobs and mobsters bring with them. Flashsites, defined by the organising of the flashmobs, are usually sites of globalised consumption – an enchanted world of brand names and designer lifestyles that can make you feel as perpetually disoriented as Alice in Wonderland. These sites serve as the symbols of enchantment in the logic of the city.[4] The new urban enchantment and mode of fantasy is located in the circuits of consumerism where, with plastic money and unlimited credit, the consuming citizen can buy all that the heart desires. However, flashmobs, outside these networks of consumption, and constituted by the same people who fit the bill of the citizen as imagined and promoted by the state and the market as they embrace globalisation and its technologies, demand a re-enchantment of the city. They force us to acknowledge the need for such public spaces to be accessible to all, and provide a strong critique of the easily accepted globalised dream in which the state is so heavily investing. Flashmobs become a manifestation of how tenuously networked, fragile communities, their collaboration inspired and enabled by cyberspatial technologies, can contest the very forces that promote and proliferate these technologies. Flashmobs become a site upon which the drama of globalisation, consumption, state and space is discursively and recursively enacted.

In The Name of The Law

That flashmobs are in a condition of illegality is perhaps one of the easiest claims to prove. The very fact that the Mumbai Police, after the first series of flashmobs, invoked Section 37(1) of the Bombay Police Act in the name of security and safety, clearly states how flashmobs are considered outside the law in the most literal sense of the word. The then Mumbai Police Deputy Commissioner of Police, Amitabh Gupta, contacted Rohit Tikmany, organiser of the first flashmob and moderator of the flashmob blogging community (http://www.mumbaimobs.org/), asking him to shut down the site and stop all further attempts at organising flashmobs. Following the ban in Mumbai, cities such as Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Delhi have enacted similar bans within the city limits. These censoring forces look at flashmobs as potentially destabilising elements that can be ‘misused’ for violent acts such as riots and bombings by fundamentalist organisations.

However, of greater interest is the way in which flashmobs manage to reproduce flashsites in conditions of social and physical illegality by creative deliberate structures of transient unintelligibility. The leisure infrastructure of malls and multiplexes, cafes and large shopping complexes, gaming zones and commercial roads of consumption, are all aimed at the new citizenry that comes into being with these new urban economies falling into place. These spaces are not only legitimate spaces of self-expression through consumption, but also authorised spaces of public assembly and gathering. They promote an ethos of incessant consumption where the individual is also installed as a consumable product that relates to others in the processes of consumption. They are the locations where brands, accessories and lifestyles all come together as the figureheads of a sanitised economy which strives to make opaque the surrounding subcultures of piracy, theft, copying and distributing that emerge around such nodal points.[5] To belong to the space of a mall or a shopping complex, one needs to almost automatically endorse the original, the authentic, the expensive, as a way of making a conscious statement of style and lifestyle. These potential flashsites become the spaces that the state legitimises as the most visible and sanitised form of urbanisation in contemporary cities.

However, flashmobs definitely subvert the sanctity or the sanity of such spaces by compelling them to suddenly introject disruptive conditions of unintelligibility. Flashmobs force the other participants of the space to enter into a narrative of confusion and chaos; of turbulence, thus rendering the space of consumption incomprehensible for the short time that the flashmob unfolds. Moreover, flashmobs do not fall under globalisation’s rhetoric of consumption, and do not require any special access powers or consumption rites, thus defying the discriminatory protocols that such spaces put in motion under the uneasily hovering sign “Rights of Admission Reserved”. Flashmobs, by rejecting the very use and expectation of the space, in spite of the heavy surveillance, state opposition and hi-tech policing, are able to distort the formulaic narratives of the space, thus creating alternative structures of resistance, of transformation, of transition. State apparatus gets completely paralysed when faced with such a radical reconfiguring, and thus goes out of its way to put a special ban upon flashmobs in a city where even a small defeat in a cricket match, or various emotional events such a public mourning or celebration, bring together crowds much louder, more aggressive, tenuous and destructive than conventional flashmobs. The transient illegality that flashmobs produce is not only at the level of the law but also at the level of legibility and comprehension.

"What do the mobsters do when they come together for a flashmob?" is a wrong question to ask. While the actions of the mobsters might be bizarre and lacking in meaning, often uninformed by any obvious ideology, flashmobs do produce new modes of signification and networking patterns, unprecedented in modern history. The ephemeral nature of the flashmobs, the improbably pseudonymous identities of the participants, the technologically mediated communication and networking patterns, all hint towards a certain notion of technosociality, where the social world around us is profoundly affected by the technologies that we adopt. In these unexpected eruptions, flashmobs create a new relationship between actors, audience and the spaces that they inhabit, including all the three into the circuits of digital technologies. As a form of radical localised performance, flashmobs offer a way to question the hierarchical intentionality of the spaces that they transform; they embody new ways in which technologies interface with our daily life, producing new forms of technosocial living.

This paper was published in Academia.edu. Click here to read the original. Download the file here. [PDF, 129 kb]

[1].These were probably the precedents to the modern day sweat shops that have characterized Globalisation in the 21st century. The ‘labour shops’ were large stone and concrete buildings which housed workers working around the clock towards incessant production. Women and children were often preferred because they were given lesser wages than men and considered more easily malleable.

[2].The transcript of the interview is available at http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/37/features-bemis.php

[3].Venugopal, himself a prolific blogger, blogged about the flashmobs at http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/37/features-bemis.php http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/37/features-bemis.php

[4]. Po Bronson, in his spectacular analysis of the Silicon Valley in The Nudist on the Late Shift, talks about how in a post-industrial city, the quantifiable icons of enchantment and progress – large factories, smoke spewing chimneys and huge barricaded stone and iron constructions have given way to small and homelike offices which are almost human and hence negligible. In his search for the new symbols of enchantment, Bronson conjures the figure of the nudist on the late shift – an eccentric double billionaire who works and lives in a cubicle and rides on the crest of the IT boom. In the case of third world countries like India, these symbols might well be these new sites of consumption that have come with globalization.

[5].One of the more exciting facets of digital technologies and globalization has been the debate over property, ownership and theft. Easy duplication of brands and bypassing the traditional circuits of distribution or sale of property have created the glorified figure of the pirate who straddles the worlds of the legal and the illegal, the digital and the physical, the ephemeral and the tactical with great ease. Within the sanctuarised spaces of malls and shopping complexes, these referents to the other world of cheap duplicates and mobile consumables hang uneasily. There is a constant attempt at establishing the original and the legitimate over the fake or copied replicas which are available in the grey markets that emerge around them.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/once-a-flash

On World Water Day - Open Data for Water Resources

sumandro — 2019-01-28T14:41:51Z

Lack of open data for researchers and activists is a key barrier against ensuring access to water and planning for sustainable management of water resources. In a collaboration between DataMeet and CIS, supported by Arghyam, we are exploring the early steps for making open data and tools to plan for water resources accessible to all. To celebrate the World Water Day 2018, we are sharing what we have been working on in the past few months - a paper on open data for water studies in India, and a web app to make open water data easily explorable and usable. Craig Dsouza led this collaboration, and authored this post.

Project Blog: Open Water Data for Integrated Water Science (External)

Open Water Data Paper - Datasets for Water Studies in India Blog - Summary: Read (External)

Open Water Data Paper - Datasets for Water Studies in India Blog - Full Paper: Read (PDF)

Open Water Data Web App: View (External)

Open Water Data Web App - Tech Stack: Read (External)

Open Water Data Web App - Precipitation Data: Read (External)

The 22nd of March is celebrated internationally as World Water Day. Water is so tightly intertwined in every aspect of our lives that one can only scratch the surface in understanding this resource. Besides directly giving us life, it is a key non-renewable shared resource that dictates whether and how societies can grow and prosper. It has shaped the way civilization arose - on riverbanks and coastal lands. Adequate water of good quality can make or break a child’s early growth. Water available at the right time in the monsoon could shape a family’s fortunes for an entire year.

Unfortunately given the development trajectory of the last century, we have struggled to strike a balance and use water in a sustainable manner. Far too many face the ill effects of this misuse. The challenge with water lies in its nature as a common pool resource, which means that it belongs to everyone. Water is for everyone to benefit from and conversely it is no individual’s responsibility to manage and to ensure its sustainability. While some laws and policies exist to ensure sustainable use of water its fluid (pun intended) and ephemeral nature make those laws very hard to enforce. No one knows for sure how much water lies under the ground and above the surface, we only have estimates. Moreover even these estimates lie in the hands of a few. The Government of India is by far the largest entity that collects data on water across the country. Management of this resource however requires that these data points and the capacity to monitor should be decentralized. The 73rd amendment recognises this by placing the authority to plan and implement local works such as watershed management and drinking water provision under the purview of Panchayats.

To address this shortcoming Datameet and CIS in collaboration have taken first steps with a project to ensure that data and tools to plan for water resources are accessible to all. The strategy within this project has been to seek alternative data sources for water, other than government data much of which still isn’t open data. Two alternatives that have emerged are remote sensing open data and crowdsourced community data. A paper put together by the team highlights the numerous sources available for datasets such as rainfall, soil moisture, groundwater levels, reservoir storages, river flows, and water demand including domestic and agricultural water. Besides the paper the team has also put together a first iteration of a web app which seeks to provide these datasets in an easy to use intuitive and interactive format to users in the area of water planning and management. The first dataset available here is CHIRPS: a high resolution daily rainfall dataset for the whole of India.

The plans for this project in the future include making available more datasets (crop maps and Evapotranspiration) and features to access them. In addition to this the goal is also to improve our understanding of the usability of remote sensing water data with efforts to calibrate it with ground observations. A key element of these plans is to develop these resources in collaboration with end users of the data so that the tools are developed with their concerns in mind. We welcome ideas, queries, feedback, and partnerships - do contact us at pune@datameet.org.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/on-world-water-day-open-data-for-water-resources

On the Path to Global Open Access: A Few More Miles to Go

praskrishna — 2011-08-20T14:35:29Z

This editorial by PLoS Medicine Editors Virginia Barbour, Jocalyn Clark, Susan Jones, Melissa Norton, and Emma Veitch was published in the magazine's March 2011, Volume 8, Issue 3.

It has been a couple of months now since the withdrawal of access via HINARI to medical journals in Bangladesh by several publishers caused an upset in the medical publishing world [1]. HINARI (Health Internetwork Access to Research Initiative) is a WHO-supported program [2] that partners with subscription-based publishers to allow researchers in the world's poorest countries to access some of their journals under certain conditions (for example, researchers have to access the journal in defined institutions). After much lobbying from researchers, editors, and others following the withdrawal, HINARI access has been—for the time being at least—reinstated, though with a substantial lack of clarity over the longer term plans of a number of the publishers [3]. Although traumatic for the researchers who lost access, the incident has triggered a useful debate on the value of open access (OA; immediate, permanent free access and permanently guaranteed unrestricted reuse, as enshrined in a Creative Commons license [4] and as practiced by publishers such as PLoS) versus free access with no legal rights attached. It is hard to think of a better example to demonstrate the precariousness of this latter type of free access, which can mean that access may be withdrawn for no reason.

Now that the heat of the HINARI debate has died down, it is an opportune time to consider how this dispute, and others like it, can be used constructively to move toward a position where universal OA to the medical literature becomes the norm.

On the positive side, the debate has brought many new voices into the discussion around access, particularly those on the online discussion forum HIFA2015 [5], where the diversity and strength of opinions expressed was most likely the key instrument in ensuring that the publishers' withdrawal from HINARI was not only brought to light, but also largely reversed.

The debacle also allowed constructive discussions around the substantial limitations of HINARI and its inability to provide a long-term sustainable solution to access in the developing world. It also allowed airing of many OA issues, including the difference between free and open access [4]; the logistical difficulties experienced by some researchers in accessing online journals, such as those in locations with low bandwidth; the suspicion of some researchers of online-only journals; and concerns over publication fees.

Thus the argument about how to implement such access, particularly in the developing world, is far from over. The issues above are very familiar to OA advocates. When PLoS Medicine was getting started seven years ago, we encountered many of the same questions from the (admittedly mostly developed-world) authors and readers we canvassed then. The phenomenal growth of OA since then has reassured many of those who initially questioned the model and its sustainability: submissions and publications are increasing each year at PLoS and in other open-access journals, reflecting the increased confidence of authors in this model. OA papers are also highly accessed, though our data suggest that most of this access, and most of the authors, still come from the developed world.

The HINARI incident thus highlights the fact that HINARI is, sadly, still needed both because of traditional publishers who have not yet implemented OA, even in the developed world, and because substantial gaps remain in our knowledge about how OA will work for the developing world. Hence, there is some way to go before this model of publishing can become the norm worldwide. Despite the best intentions of open-access publishers, we have failed to reach out adequately to debate with researchers and readers in the less-developed world about the potential benefits of open access. Instead, as is often the case when the developed world prescribes for the less-developed world, we have assumed that what works well in Paris, London, or San Francisco will work just as well in Addis Ababa, Beirut, or Lima.

Some examples of these active concerns about OA: first, are OA journals being delivered in the best format for readers in the developing world? If print really is better in some places, are we doing our best to ensure that the online journals are optimized for rapid downloading and printing of articles? If access to online journals will be primarily via mobile devices rather than computers, are we delivering the content in appropriate formats? Second, do we understand the reputation metrics outside of Europe or the US that will ensure that the new OA journals are trusted and meet the requirements authors face for academic promotions or other professional needs [6]? Even more importantly, are there OA journals available that cater to the needs of readers and authors across the developing world? Should publishers be helping groups to start their own journals, rather than assuming that the existing OA journals will be accepted?

Medical journals have many roles, but, above all, dissemination of medical information is key. This crucial role was stated clearly back in1997 by Neil Pakenham-Walsh (the founder of HIFA2015) and colleagues, and it is no less relevant now [7]: "Providing access to reliable health information for health workers in developing countries is potentially the single most cost effective and achievable strategy for sustainable improvement in health care."

Much therefore remains to be done in improving access to health information in the developing world. By providing a logistical framework for open access (by the adoption of appropriate licenses), and by showing what can be done in the developed world with OA journals, OA publishers have done much to make it possible more widely. The next crucial step is to engage with readers, researchers, and authors in the developing world to understand better their information needs so that we don't fall into the trap of pushing information in only one direction. Open access is about facilitating the movement of knowledge—in all directions.

References

Kmietowicz K (2011) Publishers withdraw 2500 journals from free access scheme in Bangladesh. BMJ 342: d196. doi:10.1136/bmj.d196.

HINARI (2011) HINARI Access to Research in Health Programme. Available:http://www.who.int/hinari/en/. Accessed 16 February 2011.

Wise A (2011) Elsevier statement on Research4Life. Lancet 377: 377. FIND THIS ARTICLE ONLINE

PLoS (2011) Definition of Open Access. Available: http://www.plos.org/oa/definition.php. Accessed 16 February 2011.

HIFA2015 (2011) A Global Campaign: Healthcare Information for All by 2015. Available:http://www.hifa2015.org/. Accessed 16 February 2011.

Chan L, Kirsop B, Arunachalam S (2011) Towards Open and Equitable Access to Research and Knowledge for Development. PLoS Med 8: 1016. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001016.

Packenham-Walsh N, Priestley C, Smith R (1997) Meeting the information needs of health workers in developing countries. BMJ 314: 90. FIND THIS ARTICLE ONLINE

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/path-2-global-open-access

On Fooling Around: Digital Natives and Politics in Asia

nishant — 2015-05-14T12:11:33Z

Youths are not only actively participating in the politics of its times but also changing the way in which we understand the political processes of mobilisation, participation and transformation, writes Nishant Shah. The paper was presented at the Digital Cultures in Asia, 2009, at the Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.

Abstract

As an increasing population in Asia experiences 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 emerging information societies are so entrenched in the rhetoric, vocabulary and practice of consumption, that they have a disconnect with the larger external reality and are often contained within digital deliriums. They discard the emergent communication and expression trends, mobilization and participation platforms, and processes of cultural production, as trivial or often unimportant. Such a perspective is embedded in a non-changing view of the political landscape and do not take into account that the youth's consumption of globalised ideas and usage of digital technologies, has led to a new kind of political revolution, which might not subscribe to earlier notions of change but nevertheless offer possibilities for great social transformation.

Context: Techno-Social Identities

It was the beginning of the 1990’s that ushered in the digital globalisation in Asia and emerging information societies were experiencing a moment of significant socio-political and econo-cultural transition. Many countries in South and East Asia restructured their developmental agenda to accommodate the neo-liberal paradigm that opened their economic and cultural capital to the globalised world markets (Roy; 2005). Unlike in the West, especially in the United States of North America and North-Western Europe, where the internet technologies developed in hallowed spaces of academic and government research, conceptualised in an idealised ethos of open source cultures, free speech and shared knowledges (Himanen; 2001), the emergence of digital ICTs were signifiers of a certain economic mobility, globalised aesthetic of incessant consumption, availability of lifestyle-choices and a reconfiguring of the State-Citizen relationship.

As different countries in Asia invested in the physical infrastructure of ICTs and widespread access to cyberspatial technologies, they also posited the figure of a techno-social citizen-subject who was caught in a double bind: On the one hand, these new subjects were the wealth of the nations, providing a base for outsourcing and back-processing industries, using their skills with digital technologies to aid the State’s aspirations of economic progress and development. With the digital technologies appearing as the panacea for the various problems of illiteracy, population explosion and ethnic/regional conflicts that have marked many Asian countries in the second half of the Twentieth Century, these new subjects were looked upon as the pall-bearers who would usher in the much desired economic development and socio-cultural reform in these emerging information societies. On the other hand, the ability of these techno-social subjects to transcend their local, to circumvent State authority and regulation, and adapt to a new era of economic and cultural consumption, posited a huge problem for these States that strove to contain the spills of an economic decision into the domains of the social, cultural and the political (Bagga, et al; 2005).

Among the populations who were actively (or, as is often the case, unwittingly) embodying these changes, were the Digital Natives – younger children and youth who have embraced digital technologies and tools as central to their every-day lives and sense of the self – who used (and abused) these technologised spaces in unpredictable and creative ways beyond, and often against, the authority of the State (Shah; 2007) . This particular identity has raised a lot of concern from different authorities like the government, the educators, the legislators and policy makers, and even civil society practitioners and theorists. Most governments had their initial responses to these Digital Native identities as rooted in paranoia and pathologisation. The cyberspatial matrices are looked at with suspicion as creating a world of the forbidden, the dirty and the dangerous. Public debates over pornography, obscenity, need to control and censor the unabashed fantasies that the cyberspaces were catering to, and a call to govern, administer and contain these spaces (and consequently, the people occupying them), have riddled through information societies around the globe.

The many anxieties that have surfaced from parents, teachers, interventionists and policy makers, have led to a global industry that is aimed at keeping the children and youth safe from the ‘ill-effects’ of being online. The responses have been varied and diverse: Radical measures from heavy censorship and regulation of all information accessed through the digital spaces to opening up de-addiction and rehabilitation centres; Strong anti-piracy and pornography drives to forming strict legislation on digital crimes; Extraordinary steps to educate the young people about the perils and pit-falls of internet usage to actual policies dissuade internet usage by regulating the physical spaces of access and the promise of dire punishments for ‘abuse’.

Providing a litany of these anxieties – each made unique by the differential and contextual experience of digital technologies across regions and societies – can be a daunting and eventually a futile exercise because the landscape of digital technologies and spaces is extremely varied and fluid and each new crisis leads to the emergence of a new set of problems. However, there are certain common tensions and uncontested assumptions that run through these anxieties, which need to be understood and examined. It is the intention of this paper to extrapolate these less visible anxieties with a particular focus on the techno-social identity more popularly referred to as Digital Natives.

Misunderstood & Misrepresented

The term ‘Digital Natives’ (Prensky, 2001) is slowly becoming ubiquitous in its usage amongst scholars and activists working in the youth-technology paradigm, especially in emerging Information Societies. The phrase is used to differentiate a particular generation – generally agreed upon as a generation that was born after 1980 – who has an unprecedented (and often inexplicable) relationship with the information technology gadgets. It is a phrase used to make us aware of the fact that these people are everywhere: On the roads taking pictures on their mobile phones and uploading them on their blogs and photo-streams; In public transport, in their own individually created islands where they listen to music and furiously typing text message their friends; In schools and universities, multitasking, preparing a classroom presentation while chatting with friends and keeping track of their online gaming avatars; In offices, glued in with equal passion on to dating and social networking sites as the geek mailing list that they moderate; In homes and bedrooms, uploading the most private and intimate details of their lives (or becoming subjects to other peoples’ online activities) on live cam feeds and audio and video podcasts; In our imaginations, sometimes cracking into our machines, at others, helping us remove that malware, and at yet others, appearing as flesh-and-body familiar strangers just a click away.

All of these are the common sense characteristics attributed to Digital Natives. These are all people born into globalised markets and liberal economies; into accelerated communication and digital representations. And they have skills (and choices) to navigate through the increasingly mediated and digitised technosocial[1] environments that we live in. Most of the stories around these Digital Natives, take on the expected tones of euphoria and paranoia. On the one hand, are the unabashed celebrations of this new digital identity and the possibilities and potentials it offers, and on the other are concerns and alarms about the lack of structures which can make meaning or shape these identities in meaningful and constructive ways which can contribute to a certain vision of democracy, equality, community building and freedom. Both these accounts often contain the Digital Native in geo-political (North-Western, developed countries) and socio-cultural (Educated, affluent, empowered), and do not provide much insight into the incipient potentials of social transformation and political participation with the rise of the Digital Native identity.

There are strident voices that knell the toll of parting day when it comes to Digital Natives. There is a general outcry from scholars that the typical Digital Native is basically dumb. Mark Bauerlein (2008) calls them ‘The Dumbest Generation’ that is jeopardising our future. He paints them as being in a state of constant distraction made of multi-tasking and gadgets that demand their attention. Psychiatrist Edward Hallowell suggests that they exhibit, because of their scattered engagement with technology, symptoms that look like attention deficit disorders. The educators in class lament about how this is a copy + paste culture that refuses to read and write or even think on their own (Bennett et al, 2008) as Digital natives increasingly depend on machines and networks to do their work for them.

In 2008, China recorded its 100 millionth internet user and also witnessed the death of a 13-year-old Digital Native, who, after two days of non-stop gaming, jumped off an elevator to ‘meet another character from his game’ (China Times; 2008) – the gaming environment leading him to a state of hypnosis where he could not make a distinction between his physical reality and his digital fantasy. Immediately following this, China started its first internet rehabilitation clinics, identifying internet addiction disorder (IAD) as significantly affecting young people’s mental growth as well as their social and interpersonal skills. Dan Tapscott has announced the birth of the “Screenagers” who are unable to look beyond their need for entertainment and personal gratification, all at their fingertips as they live their lives on the Infobahn.

It is in the nature of the design of trust online (Nevejan, 2008) that the Digital Native in his/her transactions becomes the centre of his/her own universe. The recent explosion of news feeds on sites like Facebook, or the use of Twitter to create social networks, or blogging which is often contained in echo-chambers (as demonstrated by Howard Dean’s political campaign in the USA, 2004), often gives the young Digital Native an inflated sense of the self. The tools that the Digital Natives have for finding people who think exactly like them lead to a sense of intense self gratification (Shah, 2005) and also provide a dangerous outlet for violence to themselves and others, as they find validation for their actions within that group without facing any protest or conflict – what Loren Coleman (2007) calls the ‘copycat effect’. The phenomenon of younger users seeking internet celebrity status by engaging in dangerous activities like confessionals, recording and sharing of sexual escapades, bullying and exposing themselves in ridiculous situations to get attention and limelight, have raised concern among parents and educators (Gasser and Palfrey; 2007).

This list is by no means exhaustive but gives a clear indication of how the Digital Natives are contained in the matrices of the internet in their representations and are painted as irresponsible and irreverent individuals who appear as pranksters, jesters, and clowns, carrying with them, also the darker sides of cruel humour, dark deeds and sinister pranks which need to be regulated and censored – to save the society from this growing menace, and indeed, to save them from themselves.

Pranksters, Jesters and Clowns?

It is easy, from such perspectives, to not only demonise (thus enabling regulation and control) of Digital Native identities but also ignoring their new aesthetics, politics and mechanisms of participation and change as trivial or ‘merely cultural’. There have been many instances, over the years, where each new technology and technologised space of cultural production has been treated as frivolous, infantile or faddy. Let me take this discussion through three case-studies where Digital Native spaces, engagements and activities have been perceived as juvenile or foolish to examine this particular presumption of trivialness that is often pegged on the Digital Natives and their activities. Each Case-Study has been structured in two parts: the first gives a short understanding of the technologised phenomenon and space, the second provides a brief summary of the event.

Flash (Mob) in a Pan from India

Flash-mobs: Organise, congregate, act, disperse – that is the anatomy of a flash mob. Howard Rheingold, in his book titled Smart Mobs, suggests that the people who make up smart mobs co-operate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities. Their mobile devices connect them with other information devices in the environment as well as with other people's telephones. Dirt-cheap microprocessors embedded in everything from box tops to shoes are beginning to permeate furniture, buildings, neighbourhoods, products with invisible intercommunicating smartifacts. When they connect the tangible objects and places of our daily lives with cyberspace, handheld communication media mutate into wearable remote control devices for the physical world (Rheingold, 2001). The flash-mobs, along with the now ubiquitous terms like viral-networking and crowd-sourcing are the most significant examples of the ways in which the digital networks can mobilise people towards a common cause within the digital matrices as well as in the physical world.

The story: India’s first recorded flash-mob started with a website asking for volunteers who wanted to ‘have some serious fun’. On the 3rd of October, when several cell phones rang and email inboxes found an email that briefly chalked out the time and space for a venue – a Flash site. Text messages were sent to all the members who had volunteered by anonymous agencies. And then at 5:00 p.m., the next day, about a 100 participants assembled at a mall called Crossroads.

At the Crossroads Flash-Mob, the mobsters screamed at the top of their voices and sold imaginary shares. They danced. They all froze still in the middle of their actions. And then without as much as a word, after two minutes of historic histrionics, they opened their umbrellas and dispersed, leaving behind them a trail of bewilderment and confusion. This was India’s first recorded flash-mob. People who never knew each other, did not have any largely political purpose in mind and did not really intend to extend relationships, got together to perform a set of ridiculous actions at Crossroads. This first flash mob sparked off many different flash mobs all around the nation – most of them marking out spaces like multiplexes, shopping malls, gaming parlours, body shops, large commercial roads and shopping complexes as their flash sites.

One of the most celebrated accounts of the flash-mob was by Bijoy Venugopal, a serious blogger and writer (Venugopal; October 2003), who also reiterated the fact that the intention of participation was to have some ‘serious fun.’ Subsequent experience-sharing by other members of the flash-mobs also endorsed the idea that the flash-mob was like an extension of online gaming or the tenuous digital communities which are a part of the lifestyle choices and social networking for an increasing number of people in the large urban wi-fi centres of India. The Flash-mob seemed to carry with it all the elements that digital cyberspaces have to offer – a sense of tentative belonging, a grouping of people who seek to network with each other based on similar interests, a growing sense of a need to ‘enchant’ the otherwise quickly mechanised world around us, and an exciting space of novel experiences and unmonitored, pseudonymous (except for the physical presence) fun.

The flash-mob gained huge media coverage and local buzz and was talked about and debated upon quite furiously in popular media. The organisers of the flash-mobs became instant celebrities and were questioned repeatedly about the reasons for organising the flash-mob. The answer was always unwavering – the organisers insisted that the flash-mobs were a way for them to instil fun and novelty in the very hurried life in Mumbai. On the website, Rohit Tikmany, one of the original organisers, very passionately argues:

We are not making any statement here - we are not protesting anything - we are not a revolution, a movement or an agitation. Our purpose (if any) is solely to have fun… None of us is here for anything except fun. We will not have any sponsors (covert or overt) and we will never respond to any commercial/political/religious influences. (Tikmany, 2003)

There was a particular and specific disavowal of the ‘political’. The organisers went out of their way to convince that they do not have any political cause that they endorse, that they are not affiliated with any socio-political organisations or parties in the city, and that their actions were guided only by the desire to have some fun and games. The popular media painted it as a fad that made its point about internet mobilisation but was nothing more than a flash in a pan. Initial responses to the flash-mobsters painted them as clowns – a bunch of young people having a bit of fun. It came as a particular shock, in the face of this celebratory mode of looking at flash-mobs and the composition of the crowd (largely upper class, English speaking, Educated, and implicated in the digital circuits of globalised consumption), when the flash-mobs came to be banned in Mumbai and then around the country, as ‘a serious threat the safety and security of the public’ and offering ‘unfavourable conditions of danger’ in the city.

Flash-mobs have been recorded around the globe, for different reasons and to fulfil varied socio-political ambitions. However, most of them have been explicitly for fun. Tapio Makela at the Tempare University, Finland, suggests that flash-mobs are indeed the first real-time digital gaming experience that the internet can provide us with. And yet, flash-mobs are being regulated in almost all emerging Information Societies. While the political rhetoric of unsupervised mobilisation can be understood easily, what lies beneath it is a much more interesting story. For emerging information societies in the world, the digital technologies have a much more significant role to play in economic development and creation of global infrastructure. Most governments have invested highly in the creation of techno-social skill based identities and have a clear idea of the ‘correct’ usage of technology. The flash-mobs present a situation where the ‘ideal’ citizens who should be engaging with these technologies to enhance the labour markets and augment the nation’s efforts at restructuring in global times, are engaging in apparently frivolous activities which are aimed at self gratification and fun. Flash-mobs, through their aesthetic of irreverence and fun, also present a space for criticism and political negotiation to the Digital Natives, who, while they might not be equipped to engage with traditional channels of politics, are now finding ways by which to make their opinions and expressions heard.

The Flash-mob in Mumbai, for example, builds upon a much richer contextual local history of politics and access. Crossroads, the flash-site, was also the first American Super-Mall in India. In 2001, when the mall opened, it was restrictive in its access, where it demanded the curious onlooker to either pay an entry fee of 50 Indian Rupees or be in possession of a Platinum Credit Card or a Cell phone to enter the mall. The idea was that only a certain kind of citizenship was welcome in this consumerist heaven. It was presumed that people who do not come from a class that can afford to purchase things in the mall might not know how to behave in the mall. A public interest litigation suit against the mall soon revoked these conditions of access and announced the mall as a public space of consumption. However, the lineage of the restrictive conditions that the mall opened with, resonates through the local knowledge systems. The first flash-mob at Crossroads, even though it was ‘fun’, managed to provide a critique of the new class based urban society that global India is building. Ironically, the people who constituted that flash-mob and managed to turn the mall into a place of total chaos for the brief performance were the ‘desirable’ people for the mall. Such a critique, while it might not be overtly articulated for different reasons, still manages to surface once the contextual histories of these events are produced.

10 Legendary Obscene Beasts from China

User Generated Knowledge sites: The world of knowledge production was never as shaken as it was with the emergence of the Wikipedia – a user generated knowledge production system, where anybody who has any knowledge, on almost anything in the world, can contribute to share it with countless users around the world. The camps around Wikipedia are fairly well divided: there are those who swear by it, and there are those who swear against it. There are scholars, activists and lobbyists who celebrate the democratisation of knowledge production as the next logical evolutionary step to the democratic access to knowledge. They appreciate the wisdom of crowds and revel in the joy that in the much discussed Nature magazine experiment, the number of errors in Wikipedia and its biggest opponent, Encyclopaedia Britannica, were almost the same. And then there are those who think of the Wikipedia and other such peer knowledge production and sharing systems as erroneous, unreliable and a direct result of collapsing standards that the vulgarisation of knowledge has succumbed to in the age where information has become currency. Add to this the hue and cry from academics around the globe who lament falling research standards as the copy+paste generations (Vaidhyanathan; 2008) in classrooms skim over subjects in Wikipedia rather than analysing and studying them in detail from those hallowed treasuries of knowledge – reference books.

As can be expected, the questions about the veracity, verifiability, trustworthiness and integrity of Wikipedia and other such user generated knowledge sharing sites (including YouTube, Flickr, etc.) are carried on in sombre tones by zealots who are devoted to their beliefs. However, the one question that remains unasked, in the discussion of these sites, is the question of what purpose it might serve beyond the obvious knowledge production exercise.

The Story: In China, where the government exerts great control over regulating online information, Wikipedia had a different set of debates which would not feature in the more liberal countries – the debates were around what would be made accessible to a Wikipedia user from China and what information would be blanked out to fit China’s policy of making information that is ‘seditious ‘and disrespectful’, invisible. After the skirmishes with Google, where the search engine company gave in to China’s demands and offered a more censored search engine that filtered away results based on sensitive key-words and issues, Wikipedia was the next in line to offer a controlled internet knowledge base to users in China.

However, another user-generated knowledge site, more popular locally and with more stringent self-regulating rules than Wikipedia, became the space for political commentary, satire, protest and demonstration against the draconian censorship regimes that China is trying to impose on its young users. The website Baidu Baike (pinyin for Baidu Encyclopaedia), became popular in 2005 and was offered by the Chinese internet search company Baidu. With more than 1.5 million Chinese language articles, Baidu has become a space for much debate and discussion with the Digital Natives in China. Offered as a home-grown response to Wikipedia, Baidu implements heavy ‘self-censorship to avoid displeasing the Chinese Government’ (BBC; 2006) and remains dedicated to removing ‘offensive’ material (with a special emphasis on pornographic and political events) from its shared space.

It is in this restrictive regime of information sharing and knowledge production, that the Digital Natives in China, introduced the “10 legendary obscene beasts” meme which became extremely popular on Baidu. Manipulating the Baidu Baike’s potential for users to share their knowledge, protestor’s of China’s censorship policy and Baidu’s compliance to it, vandalised contributions by creating humorous pages describing fictitious creatures, with names vaguely referring to Chinese profanities, with homophones and characters using different tones.

The most famous of these creations was Cao Ni Ma (Chinese: 草泥马), literally "Grass Mud Horse", which uses the same consonants and vowels with different tones for the Chinese language profanity which translates into “Fuck Your Mother” cào nǐ mā (肏你妈) . This mythical animal belonging to the Alpaca race had dire enemies called héxiè (河蟹), literally translated as “river crabs”, very close to the word héxié (和谐) meaning harmony, referring to the government’s declared ambition of creating a “harmonious society” through censorship. The Cao Ni Ma, has now become a popular icon appearing in videos distributed on YouTube, in fake documentaries, in popular Chinese internet productions, and even in themed toys and plushies which all serve as mobilising points against censorship and control that the Chinese government is trying to control.

However, the reaction from those who do not understand the entire context is, predictably, bordering on the incredulous. Most respondents on different blogs and meme sites, think of these as mere puns and word-plays and juvenile acts of vandalism. The Chinese monitoring agencies themselves failed to recognise the profane and the political intent of these productions and hence they survived on Baidupedia, to become inspiring and iconic symbols of the slow and steady protest against censorship and the right to information act in China. Following these brave acts, Baidu’s user base also experimented very successfully with well-formed parodies and satires, opening up the first spaces in modern Chinese history, for political criticism and negotiation.[2] What is discarded or overlooked as jest or harmless pranks, are actually symptomatic of a new generation using digital tools and spaces to revisit what it means to be politically active and engaged. The 10 obscene legendary creatures, like the flash-mobs, can be easily read as juvenile fun and the actions of a youth that is quickly losing its connection with the immediate contemporary questions. However, a contextual reading combined with a dismantling of the “Digital Native in a bubble” syndrome, can lead to a better understanding of the new aesthetic of social transformation and political participation – one which is embedded in the growing aesthetic of fun, irreverence, and playfulness.

A 32 Year Old Dancing Global Nomad

Context: The aesthetic of irreverence, of playfulness and of exuberant joy is perhaps the best demonstrated by the third case-study which deals with user generated content and sharing sites like YouTube and Blip TV or social networking sites like Facebook and Livejournal. With the easy availability of digital technologies of production – portable laptops and digital cameras, PDAs enabled with phones and multi-media services, webcams and microphones – and tools to share and exchange these productions, there has been an unprecedented amount of digital cultural production which has propelled what we now call the Web 2.0 explosion. There has been much criticism about how we are building a junkyard of digital information. Videos of cats and hamsters dancing, inane audio and video podcasts documenting personal anecdotes and opinions, blogs that publish everything from favourite recipes to sexual escapades, and social networking sites that map rising networks, all add to the immense amount of data that dwells in cyberspace. Questions of data mining, of data redundancy are coupled with alarms of the ‘infantile’ uses of technology have emerged in recent debates around this user generated content. Governments are also battling with problems of piracy, hate-speech, bullying and fundamentalism that have found pervasive channels through these platforms and networks.

The Story: In the middle of celebrity hamsters (Hampster the Hamster), popular dancing babies, and parodies of pop stars, there was one particular internet celebrity who is famous, because nobody knows where he is going to dance next. “Where the Hell is Matt?” is a viral video which shot to fame first in 2006, which features Matt Harding, a video game designer from America, who performs a singularly identifiable dance routine in front of various popular destinations in different countries around the world. It started off as a friend recording Matt Harding doing a peculiar dance in Vietnam became popular on the internet and became one of the most popular videos on cyberspace, with his second video released in 2008, viewed 19,860,041 times on YouTube as on 31st March 2009.

Harding has now become a celebrity, featuring on TV talk shows, guest lecturing at universities, and is brand ambassador to a couple of global brands. He is now, also featured dancing on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day website under the title “Happy People Dancing on Planet Earth”, claiming that it shows humans worldwide sharing a joy of dancing. Unlike the flash-mobs and the Baidupedia instances, Where The Hell is Matt? does not have any overt political position or agenda. It has not entered into a condition of strife or struggle with any authoritative regimes or systems of conflict. And yet, what Harding has managed, through his ‘pranks’ , is to create a series of videos which have now come to embody values of cultural diversity, tolerance and universal joy. Instead of making serious speeches, petitions or demonstrations, through his prankster image, Matt Harding has become the unofficial ambassador of peace and harmony around the globe, being discussed avidly by anybody who sees him, with a smile.

One can either ignore this viral video as a short-lived meme that will soon be forgotten by the next dancing sensation. Even if it might be true, the impact that the “Where the Hell is Matt?” videos have created is significant. When Matt sarcastically said at Entertainment Gathering, that his videos were a hoax, that he was an actor and the videos were an exercise in animatronic puppets and video editing, he had everybody from fans on blogs to new reporters on television responding to it – some often with outrage at being ‘fooled’ by such morphing. Harding revealed his ‘hoax about a hoax’ at the Macworld convention to great amusement. While Matt’s dancing pranks might indeed be forgotten by the next big thing, it is still a fruitful exercise to read it as symptomatic of a much larger redefinition of notions of political participation and social transformation that the Digital Natives and their technology-mediated environments are bringing about.

Digital Natives: Causes, Pauses

Running common, through all these three stories, in popular discourse as well as in academic scholarship, is the presumption of frivolity and non-seriousness that misses out on the much larger contexts of socio-political change. The youth have always been at the forefront of social transformation and political participation. The youth, traditionally, has also had an intimate relationship with new technologies of cultural production, producing influential aesthetics through experimentation and innovation. A brief look at the socio-political history of technologies, shows us that the young who grow up with certain technologies as central to their mechanics of life and living, have led to a reconfiguring of their role and function in the society. The emergence of the print culture, for example, led to the energising of the public spheres in Europe, where young people with access to education and books, could participate and restructure their immediate socio-political environments. Cinematic realism has had its heyday as the tool for political mobilisation through representing the voice of the underprivileged communities. The expansion of the tele-communication networks have led to the rise and fall of governments while changing the face of socio-political and economic activities.

It is not as if these technologies were without their own concerns, questions and doubts. However, most of these anxieties have been successfully resolved through experience, experiment and analysis. Such practices and communities have Moreover, the promise and the potential of this youth-technology engagement have always surpassed the ensuing anxiety.

With the Digital Natives, as a small percentage of the world’s population engages with technologies and tools that are quickly gaining currency and popularity, there seems to be a cacophony of alarms and anxieties which seem to have no scope for resolution or respite. And this alarm seems to be louder and more anxious than ever before because it marks a disconnect of the Digital Natives from the role that youth-technology relationships has borne through history – that the Digital Natives are in a state of apathy when it comes to engaging in processes of social transformation and political mobilisation and prefer to stay in isolated bubbles of consumerism and entertainment. This particular accusation that is levelled at the Digital Natives, if true, is not only alarming but also bodes dire fortunes for the whole world as a new generation refuses to engage with questions of politics, governance and transformation outside of the realm of the economic and the personal. This particular disconnect amplifies the other anxieties – moral anxieties around pornography and sexuality, ethical anxieties about plagiarism and piracy, intellectual anxieties about knowledge production and research – because the re-assurance that the Digital Natives will augment the processes of positive social transformation and fruitful political participation, is perceived as lost.

Moreover, unlike earlier technologies, the youth is not being guided into the use of digital technologies but are actually spearheading the development, consumption and rise of these technologies. There is a strong reversal of the power structure, where the digital migrants and settlers have to depend upon the Digital Natives to traverse the terrain of the digital environments. The Digital Natives are in a uniquely singular position where, due to the economic and global restructuring of the world, their world-view and ideas are gaining more currency and visibility than those belonging to previous generations. However, the adults who enter the world of the Digital Natives, insist on viewing them through certain misapplied prisms:

Difference without change: These stories or anecdotal data almost always gives us a sense of marked difference of identity in an unchanging world. The Digital Native remains a category or identity which remains to be understood in its difference to integrate it into a world vision that precedes them. The difference is invoked only to emphasise the need for continuity from one generation to another; and thus making a call to ‘rehabilitate’ this new generation into earlier moulds of being.

The social construction of loss: A common intention of these stories is to mourn a loss. Each new technology has always been accompanied by a nostalgia industry that immediately recreates a pre-technologised, innocent world that was simpler, better, fairer, and easier to live in. Similarly, the Digital Native identity is premised on multiple losses[3] : loss of childhood, loss of innocence, loss of control, loss of privacy etc. Predicated on this list, is the specific loss of political participation and social transformation; a loss of the youth as the political capital of our digital futures.

Trivialising the realm of the Cultural: The third is that these anecdotes of celebration and fear, mark the Digital Native’s actions and practices as confined to some “My bubble, My space” personal/cultural private world of consumption which, when they do connect to larger socio-political phenomena, is accidental. Moreover, they concentrate on the activities and the immediate usage/abuse of technology rather than concentrating on the potentials that these tools and interactions have for the future. They paint the Digital Native as without agency, solipsistic, and in the ‘pointless pursuit of pleasure’, thus dismissing their cultural interactions and processes as trivial and residing in indulgent consumption and personal gratification.

Such perspectives and analytical impulses are a result of the pertinent and influential research methods and disciplinary baggage within contemporary cybercultures studies. Much of the imagination of the Digital Natives carries the baggage of false dichotomies and binaries of discourse around technologically mediated identities. Within cybercultures studies, as well as in earlier interdisciplinary work on digital internets, there has been an explicit and now an implied division of the physical and the virtual. The virtual seems to be a world only loosely anchored in the material and physical reality, and almost seems to be at logger heads with the real in producing its own hyper-visual reality. These distinctions, though not often invoked, are present in different imaginations of the Digital Natives. They seem to reside in virtual worlds producing a ‘disconnect’ from their everyday reality. The alternative public spheres of speech and expression created by the rise of the blogosphere and peer-to-peer networking sites seem to reside only within the digital domain. The frenzied cultural production and consumption on sites like YouTube and Second Life are contained within digital deliriums. Similarly, when attention is paid to Digital Natives and their activities, it is confined to what they do, inhabit, consume and produce online, often forgetting their embodied presence circumscribed by different contexts.

The notion of contexts, as it is relevant and important to understand techno-social identities, is even more crucial when talking about Digital Natives. Contextualised understanding of their environments, histories, and engagement help us to realise that Digital Native is not a universal identity. Even though the technologies that they use are often global in nature, and the tools and gadgets they employ are shared across borders, the way a digital native identity is constructed and experienced is different with different contexts. As we see, in the case of the flash-mobs and the Baidupedia, the digital native, especially when it comes to social transformation and political participation, is a fiercely local and context based identity and community. It is because of this, that Ethan Zuckerman’s Cute Cat Theory (2005) actually makes sense – that the Digital Natives, when they do utilise digital tools for social transformation or mobilisation, will not go in search for new tools. Instead, they will use the existing platforms and spaces that they are already using to share pictures of cute cats across the globe. The idea of a context based Digital Native identity also leads me to suggest two things to conclude this paper: The first, that Digital Natives are not merely people who are using new tools and technologies to augment the ideas of change and participation that an earlier, development-centric generation has grown up with. By introducing and experimenting with their aesthetic of fun, playfulness and irreverence, they are re-visiting the terrain of what it means to be political and often embedding their politics into seemingly inane or fruitless cultural productions, which create sustainable conditions of change. The second, that the Digital Natives, while they seem to be a different generation and having a unique technology-human relationship, are not really different when it comes to envisioning the role of youth-technology paradigm in the society. What is really different, with this young generation of active, interested and engaged people, is that their local movements and actions are globally shared and accessed, thus forging, perhaps in unprecedented ways, international and cross-cultural communities of support, help and interest. Moreover, these communities subscribe to a new paradigm and vocabulary of socio-political change which is often tied to their every-day actions of entertainment, leisure, networking and cultural production, which provide the potential for the next big change that the Digital Natives set themselves to.

[1]. The term ‘techno-social’, coined by Arturo Escobar, refers to a social identity mediated by technology. It puts special emphasis that the digital and physical environments need to be seen in segue with each other rather than disconnected as is often the case in cybercultures and technology studies.

[2].A more serious political satire that moves beyond just punning and avoiding censorship was found in the now-deleted entry for revolutionary hero Wei Guangzheng (伟光正, taken from 伟大, 光荣, 正确, "great, glorious, correct"). An excerpt from it is included here for sampling.

Wei Guangzheng
Comrade Wei Guangzheng is a superior product of natural selection. In the course of competition for survival, because of certain unmatched qualities of his genetic makeup, he has a great ability to survive and reproduce, and hence Wei Guangzheng represents the most advanced state of species evolution. Here is the evolution of Wei Guangzheng's thinking: Since the day of his birth, comrade Wei Guangzheng established a guiding ideology for the people's benefit, and in the course of connecting it with the real circumstances of his beloved Sun Kingdom, a process of repeated comparisons that involved the twists and turns of campaigns of encirclement and suppression, his ideology finally realized a historic leap forward and generated two major theoretic achievements. The first great theoretic leap was the idea of leading a handful of people to take up arms to cause trouble, rebellion, and revolution in order to build a brave new world, and to successfully seize power. This was the "spear ideology." The second great theoretic leap was a theory, with Sun Kingdom characteristics, in which Wei Guangzheng was unswervingly upheld as leader and the people were forever prevented from standing up. This was the "shield theory." Under the guidance of these two great theoretic achievements, comrade Wei Guangzheng won victory after victory. Practice has proven, "Without Wei Guangzheng, there would be no Sun Kingdom." Following the road of comrade Wei Guangzheng was the choice of the people of the Sun Kingdom and an inevitable trend of historical development.

[3]Indeed, as Chris Jenks notes in his work on the construction of youth, through history, it is the function of civilisation to construct youth as not only an innocent category which needs to be saved but also a demonic identity which needs to be trained and taught into the roles and functions of civilisation. Each emergent technology of cultural production, in its turn, has been examined as potentially contributing to the notions of the youth and their role and function in the society.

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This research paper was published in Academia.edu. It can be downloaded here

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