Centre for Internet and Society

April 2010 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-08-13T04:51:19Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! We bring you updates of our research, events and news for the month of April 2010.

News Updates

Worries voiced over ID Project
The Government of India's Unique Identification (UID) Project came under flak at a workshop organised jointly by the Citizen Action Forum (CAF), the People's Union of Civil Liberties - Karnataka, the Alternative Law Forum and the Centre for Internet and Society - An article in The Hindu - 17th April.
http://cis-india.org/news/worries-voiced-over-id-project

UID: A debate on the Fundamental Rights
UID: A debate on the Fundamental Rights - was jointly organized by the Citizen Action Forum, People's Union for Civil Liberties - Karnataka, Alternative Law Forum and the Centre for Internet and Society on April 16th at IAT, Queens Road, Bangalore - An article in the Prajavani news paper - April 17th.
http://cis-india.org/news/uid-a-debate-on-fundamental-rights

UID is an invasion of Privacy: Experts
The Nandan Nilekani headed Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) came in for much criricism at the first of a series of debates on the issue organised in the city on Friday - Deccan Chronicle, April 17th.
http://cis-india.org/news/uid-is-an-invasion-of-privacy-experts

Experts debate on UID and rights
Bangalore, Apr 16, DHNS: A debate on ‘UID and Fundamental Rights’ organised by several city-based organisations, discussed the social, ethical issues, economic and legal issues that accompanies the UID.
http://cis-india.org/news/experts-debate-on-uid-and-rights

Amendment to Copyright Act opposed
A report on the press conference held on 15th April, at the Press Club, Bangalore: The Hindu
http://cis-india.org/news/amendment-to-copyright-act-opposed

They fight for the visually challenged
Times News Network - A report on the press conference held at the Press Club, Bangalore on 15th April, 2010.
http://cis-india.org/news/they-fight-for-the-visually-challenged

Digital Natives Research Project Coordinator
The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, in collaboration with Hivos Netherlands, is looking for a Research Project Coordinator to help develop a knowledge network and coordinate international workshops for the project "Digital Natives with a Cause?"
http://cis-india.org/news/research-coordinator

Expel or not? That is the question
The decision of an international school to expel 14 students for their alleged ‘promiscuous’ behaviour has led to much debate and discussion.
http://cis-india.org/news/expel-or-not

Nokia eyes GeNext to tap mobile email mkt
Finnish handset giant banks on youth to be in the technology race
http://cis-india.org/news/nokia-eyes-genNext

Research

Critical Point of View: Videos
The Second event for the Critical Point of View reader on Wikipedia was held in Amsterdam, by the Institute of Network Cultures and the Centre for Internet and Society. A wide range of scholars, academics, researchers, practitioners, artists and users came together to discuss questions on design, analytics, access, education, theory, art, history and processes of knowledge production. The videos for the full event are now available for free viewing and dissemination.

Colour Me Political
What are the tools that Digital Natives use to mobilise groups towards a particular cause? How do they engage with crises in their immediate environments? Are they using their popular social networking sites and web 2.0 applications for merely entertainment? Or are these tools actually helping them to re-articulate the realm of the political? Nishant Shah looks at the recent Facebook Colour Meme to see how new forms of political participation and engagement are being initiated by young people across the world.
http://cis-india.org/research/dn/dn2

Meet the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine
Digital Natives live their lives differently. But sometimes, they also die their lives differently! What happens when we die online? Can the digital avatar die? What is digital life? The Web 2.0 Suicide machine that has now popularly been called the 'anti-social-networking' application brings some of these questions to the fore. As a part of the Hivos-CIS "Digital Natives with a Cause?" research programme, Nishant Shah writes about how Life on the Screen is much more than just a series of games.
http://cis-india.org/research/dn/dn1

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

Advocacy

Accessibility

e-Accessibility: A Wiki Project
Envisaged and funded by the National Internet Exchange of India, and executed by the Centre for Internet and Society, a Wiki site pertaining to issues of disability and e-accessibility has recently been launched.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/accessibility/blog/e-accessibility-a-wiki-project

Copyright Law as a tool for Inclusion
Can Copyright Law be used as a tool for Inclusion? Rahul Cherian examines this in his blog on copyright.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/accessibility/blog/copyright-law-as-tool-for-inclusion

Web Accessibility as a Government Mandate?
Is Web accessibility just a Government Mandate? Should private sites be ignored? Wesolowski examines this in light of the steps taken by ictQATAR to make its website accessible to W3C standards, and hopes that Qatar and eventually all other Arab nations will follow suit and make Web accessibility much more of a mandate.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/accessibility/blog/web-accessibility-government-mandate

Intellectual Property

When Copyright Goes Bad
A part of the Access to Knowledge Project, this short film by Consumers International is available on DVD and online at A2Knetwork.org/film.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/ipr/blog/when-copyright-goes-bad

Openness

Research Project on Open Video in India
Open Video Alliance and the Centre for Internet and Society are calling for researchers for a project on open video in India, its potentials, limitations, and recommendations on policy interventions.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/openness/blog/open-video-research

Does the Social Web need a Googopoly?
While the utility of the new social tool Buzz is still under question, the bold move into social space taken last week by the Google Buzz team has Gmail users questioning privacy implications of the new feature. In this post, I posit that Buzz highlights two privacy challenges of the social web. First, the application has sidestepped the consensual and contextual qualities desirable of social spaces. Secondly, Google’s move highlights the increasingly competitive and convergent nature of the social media landscape.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/openness/blog/does-the-social-web-need-a-googopoly

The (in)Visible Subject: Power, Privacy and Social Networking
In this entry, I will argue that the interplay between privacy and power on social network sites works ultimately to subject individuals to the gaze of others, or to alternatively render them invisible. Individual choices concerning privacy preferences must, therefore, be informed by the intrinsic relationship which exists between publicness/privateness and subjectivity/obscurity.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/openness/blog/the-in-visible-subject-power-privacy-and-social-networking

Internet Governance

Does the Safe-Harbor Program Adequately Address Third Parties Online?
While many citizens outside of the US and EU benefit from the data privacy provisions the Safe Harbor Program, it remains unclear how successfully the program can govern privacy practices when third-parties continue to gain more rights over personal data. Using Facebook as a site of analysis, I will attempt to shed light on the deficiencies of the framework for addressing the complexity of data flows in the online ecosystem.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/igov/blog/does-the-safe-harbor-program-adequately-address-third-parties-online

Sense and censorship
Sunil Abraham examines Google's crusade against censorship in China in wake of the attacks on its servers in this article published in the Indian Express.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/igov/blog/sense-and-censorship

Report on the Fourth Internet Governance Forum for Commonwealth IGF
This report by Pranesh Prakash reflects on the question of how useful is the IGF in the light of meetings on the themes of intellectual property, freedom of speech and privacy.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/igov/blog/report-on-fourth-IGF

Telecom

The Right Ring Tone
Focus on improving service quality with a strong partner, and not on one-shot stake sales, says Shyam Ponappa in his article published in the Business Standard on April 1, 2010.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/telecom/blog/ring-tone

Other Advocacy

Maps for Making Change Wiki Now Open to the Public
Since December 2009, CIS has been coordinating and nurturing the Maps for Making Change project, organised in collaboration with Tactical Tech. During the past four months, participants have been on a challenging yet fertile and inspiring journey that is now slowly coming to an end. Would you like to know more about what has happened in the time that has passed? The Maps for Making Change wiki is a good place to start.
http://cis-india.org/advocacy/others/maps-for-making-change-wiki-now-open-to-the-public

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/april-2010-bulletin

An Experiment in Social Engineering: The Cultural Context of an Avatar

praskrishna — 2012-03-06T06:03:19Z

Pramod K. Nayar reviews Nilofar Shamim Ansher’s essay ‘Engineering a Cyber Twin’ (Digital Alternatives with a Cause? Book One: To Be).

‘Engineering a Cyber Twin’ is an attempt to inventory the ontological features of an avatar. Beginning with the assumption that representation of the self – which implies, at once, recognition of one’s self but also the publicly available narrative of the self – is controlled and controllable, Ansher moves on to representation online. What are the cues that enable viewers of avatars to recognize Ansher’s avatar? What are the parameters of evaluating avatar behaviour, as opposed to, say offline behaviour? Ansher here intervenes with a significant question: why do we always have to ‘read’ the avatar as divided from or compared with the self? Is it an ‘either/or’ equation between self and online avatar?

Examining her cybertwin on MyCybertwin.com, Ansher describes how she designed her avatar. The process included filling out a detailed questionnaire from which the avatar takes its shape, attitudes, values and determines its responses. Essentially, as Ansher discovers, the ‘cyber twin runs on scripts running in my head [sic]’. The personality type to which the twin belongs to must be chosen from a set of six types – which, as Ansher correctly points out, leaves little room for fluidity beyond what the programmer has designed. This also implies that Ansher’s self and the cyber twin function within severe constraints of personality and responses to the personality of the other. When Ansher communicates with the cyber twin the twin picks up keywords from Ansher’s script and conveys them back as its (her?) ‘response’, all suggesting a packaged response. This ensures that there are not too many permutations and combinations or ‘layers’ (Ansher’s term) to the cyber twin’s personality.

Ansher wonders what it would take for the twin to discover motivation, or human ‘sentiments’ such as love or care. Does the avatar really constitute a separate entity, or is it a severely limited extension of what Ansher has chosen from the questionnaire. Ansher has deeper metaphysical questions that connect archives (of information, including the questionnaire) with larger issues of an ethical nature. For example, Ansher notes that she can’t teach her twin ‘good’ and bad’ behaviour from just a questionnaire. Ansher concludes that the twin has not ‘earned the right’ to represent her as her online version.

This is a pithy essay that explores the exhilarations, excitements and tensions of online lives (such avatar lives quietly avoid the domain of messy body functions and fluids). Ansher is spot on in her evaluation of the cyber twin as a limited ‘identity’ where the code – the DNA, or the questionnaire – is itself based on a very short list of normative values and personality ‘types’. She is also correct to argue that the self in real life is not a set of stock responses even if these responses are what have been socialized into us. The self evolves, alters, shifts and these are not always programmable or predictable. Ansher rightly does not go so far as to explore sentience in computers and programming (the stuff of sci-fi), but is concerned with the dynamics of interaction between a sentient creature (her real self) and the avatar.

The ‘engineering’ in Ansher’s title must take on an ironic tone: the avatar is an experiment in social engineering as well where the norms of self-making and meaning-making are cultural and engineering an avatar with stock responses (to which then Ansher responds in the chat) with predilections, preferences and prejudices constitutes a kind of cultural work. When for instance Ansher writes: ‘she [the avatar] doesn’t add layers to her identity so much as reinforce the various traits that go into defining it’ she has isolated the key issue here: the cultural work that produces avatars and online iconography with specific traits are trapped within and limited by the contexts in which real selves grow. Both partake of each other: the cultural work produces the Ansher-self and this Ansher-self produces her avatar. The difference of course is that the Ansher-self is not fixed, is complicated and defiantly unpredictable.

This is an important essay that sidesteps the risks of both hagiography (of digital worlds) and the panic Luddite reactions (not responses, but reactions) to the ‘other’ world. I would have liked a bit more – to be fair, this might be entirely due to the space constraints in the volume – on the eversion of the digital world that we now see: where the digital, the cyber- or the ‘other’ world is not just out there but around us, in us, since we occupy, almost simultaneously, the offline and online today. So, to answer the question raised in the first paragraph, one does not see the cybertwin in terms of an ‘either/or’ with the self. It is simultaneously the radically different other and the extension of the self. The self itself is a series of posturings, role-playings and performances. The online avatar is also one more of these. The presentation of the self in everyday life, to adapt the title of Goffman’s pioneering work, now includes status messages, scraps, posts, tweets and avatars. The narrative of the self is now inclusive of the sometimes fictional narratives put online by the self. Profile and impression management is also about how one dresses online.

It would also be interesting to examine the various clusters of avatars in such services as MyCybertwin.com or Second Life, to develop a taxonomy of avatars. If, as suggested above, it is cultural work that carries over into designing avatars then such a taxonomy might say something about the societies and structures from which such avatars emerge.

Ansher’s essay draws attention to the complicated ontology of the avatar but also reflects, with considerable intensity, on the dynamic relation of online and offline selves. Thus she eschews a simplistic binary of offline/online, preferring to focus on the domain of interaction between the two ‘personae’ of the same self.

Pramod K. Nayar

Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India. His recent publications include Writing Wrongs: The Cultural Construction of Human Rights in India (Routledge 2012), States of Sentiment: Exploring the Cultures of Emotion (Orient BlackSwan 2011), An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures (Wiley-Blackwell 2010), Postcolonialism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum 2010), Packaging Life: Cultures of the Everyday (Sage 2009), Seeing Stars: Spectacle, Society and Celebrity Culture (Sage 2009) among others. His forthcoming books include Digital Cool: Life in the Age of New Media (Orient BlackSwan) and Colonial Voices: The Discourses of Empire (Wiley-Blackwell).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/media-coverage/an-experiment-in-social-engineering

Alternative Approaches to Social Change

praskrishna — 2012-01-30T06:04:23Z

Review of Maesy Angelina’s essay, "Digital Natives’ Alternative Approach to Social Change", in Digital Alternatives with a Cause Book 2: To Think, pp.64-76 by Nuraini Juliastuti.

Dominant assumptions about social movements need a redefinition. They are not compatible with youth movements, which are mainly operated within the framework of contemporary technology development.

Although being acknowledged as ‘the potential future directions of activism’, the capability of digital-based movements to bring about concrete changes has been in doubt. It has been associated with degrading terms such as ‘slacktivism’ or ‘click activist’. Some scholars consider it a quasi-movement, and argue that it needs to be accompanied with “real” activism.

Each movement calls for a different analytical lens. The source of predicaments of the digital movement opponents revolves around the persistence of focusing on concrete aspects of a movement. Unless we consider the tangible aspects, a proper understanding of a digital movement cannot be realized.

Observations about intangible aspects of a movement will keep a research from clinging to activism with a capital A, and start seeing a gradation in the social movement practices. It is constructive and opens the door to analyses of multi-dimensional movements such as the Blank Noise initiative (India). Drawing on methods of identifying new developments to the field of social movement, Maesy examines some aspects of it: the issue, strategy, site of action, and internal mode of organization.

First, a straightforward summary of Blank Noise. It is a movement to address sexual harassment against women in public spaces in India. Sexual harassment includes staring, catcalls, groping, and is usually disregarded as a one-off, casual incident. It also takes under purview ‘eve teasing’, generally considered soft sexual harassment. Established in 2003, the main workspaces of the collective are a combination of street interventions and online campaigns mediated on social media sites such as blogs, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter.

Blank Noise attempts to subvert populist notions of what activism is within culture. Artistic approaches are regarded not as merely illustrational, but integrated into the methods of drawing attention to sexual harassment.

It chooses not to see things through a simple black and white perspective, but from a more complex view; loose, not rigid, is an instructive term to explain the character of the movement that is held together by two stakeholders: youth and technology.

In the antecedent period—this essay provides little space for it and hence lacks a historical explanation—social movements were carried out by non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The keyword ‘society empowerment’ was in application then; embedded within is the idea of power relations. The NGO activists are powerful agencies and therefore have the authority to empower others.

In the case of Blank Noise, it consciously disrupts the mainstream notion of what a social movement entails and at the same time, displays coherencies within the accepted movement’s principles: the collective thus offers alternative approaches. An alternative movement however, is indicative of a classic pattern within the trajectory of social movements - it is a natural occurrence in response to a static state of affairs. Negotiations of the appropriate ways to confront circumstances are accelerating, putting old concepts of voluntarism, political participation, social contribution, and the meaning of being an activist into fragile categorizations. They are all subject to constant reinterpretations.

A new question then arises: as local people acknowledge Blank Noise as an outstanding example of citizen activism in India, does this youth initiative differentiate itself from other youth movements of its kind?

Online spaces formerly built to showcase the profile of movement organizers have now transformed into collaborative workspaces to archive and advocate women’s right movement. Interactivity has permeated through online spaces, replacing the static nature which was earlier associated with activism-related websites. The distance between the initiators and the participants is disappearing. The initiators and the participants are no longer two separate entities and are now joint content producers.

Some literatures characterize a social movement as a form of intellectual intervention. It is the practice of social intervention where the power is arranged in a relatively clear intellectual hierarchy. The dynamics of the action spaces has blurred such a hierarchy. Nonetheless, the question of class is still worth asking.

The issues of the ideologies of technologies being used in a movement, how they are operated, the actors behind them, what discourses are being developed, whose interests do they speak on behalf of, are important matters to be further explored to bring forth a reflection on power dynamics.

An undemanding way to value a social movement is through impact examination. A common way to assess impact is by observing the tangible aspects of the movement or campaign: the number of participants in activities conducted (do men and women participate equally in them?); the number of meetings; the organization’s coverage; public response to the campaign; statistics of crime. It asserts that a significant impact can be achieved through concrete goals and demands.

The question of impact meets its philosophical turn when dealing with a grey issue such as normalization of street sexual violence. The meaning of street sexual violence is hard to pin down. One of the possible ways to cope with it is through a micro-movement. It is a strategy, which aims to create changes at the personal level. The meaning of empowerment is shifting. In the case of Blank Noise, as the author puts it, “they empower people through their experience with the collective”.

Blank Noise differs from other types of movements in their inability to identify the opponent. Or, rather, they live a situation where it is impossible to establish who and what the opponent is. Rather than merely seeing it as a representation of the faltering state, as many scholars usually do, the author sees it as a ‘grey productive gesture’. It directs the course of the movement to a constant dialogue with the meaning of participation. Often unintentionally, it engages in the search of the meaning of what one can contribute to the others, without having the need to incorporate in, or being absorbed into, old society empowerment jargon. It attempts to remake the language of a movement.

But how should an opponent be defined? And how should change be defined? Although indirectly, the discussion on ways of organizing the movement as well as articulating the issue—the uncertainty about their values included, points to the base of the debate on the concept of activism. As each context is walking its own social-technological life path, and the division between the debatable terms ‘quasi-activism’ and ‘real activism’ requires an elaborate explanation, what changes should social movements bring (and how ‘real’ should they be), is still a difficult question to answer.

Changes function both as the foundation and goal of the digital native movement. Much as they indicate hopefulness, changes often turn out to be grim and lead to frustrating facts. As alternative ways of social movements are developing and being performed in various contexts, in particular historical junctures many things remain the same. Instead of progress, a series of setbacks become apparent.

It is as if each new movement’s strategy would bring back the possibilities of reversals and stagnancies, putting causes and choices in question. It is not about the seemingly clear separation between decisiveness and indecisiveness. This is the time when being decisive offers clichéd, predictable acts, which are often twisted into an intense, conservative attitude. This is the time when being indecisive is promisingly progressive and demonstrating the signs of thinking critically. It may seem indefinite, but it provides spaces for resiliency, an important character to develop amid the chaotic situation.

Nuraini Juliastuti is the co-founder of KUNCI Cultural Studies Center (http://kunci.or.id/) established in 1999 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. She is currently a PhD student at Universiteit Leiden, Netherlands, focusing on popular music in Southeast Asia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/media-coverage/alternative-approaches-to-social-change-1

Alternate Visions: Accessing Leisure Through Interfaces

noopur — 2012-02-18T15:18:34Z

Name(s): Noopur Raval
Location: Delhi, India
Age: 23
Profession: Student, researcher

Video Genre: Animation

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/alternate-visions-accessing-leisure-through-interfaces

Activism: Unraveling the Term

maesy — 2015-05-14T12:25:05Z

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

Youth's Popular Imagination of Activism

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

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

Activism as the Intention and Action

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

(Apurva Mathad, male, 28).

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

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

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

Activism as Particular Ways of Doing and Being

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

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

(Hemangini Gupta, female, 29).

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

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

Youth: The Activist, the Apathetic, and the Everyday

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

(Jasmeen Patheja)

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

(Kunal Ashok, men, 29)

“... an idea that really works.”

(Neha Bhat, 19)

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

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

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

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

Across Borders

nishant — 2015-04-24T11:55:41Z

A friend and I were at a cafe in Bangalore the other day, when an acquaintance walked in. After the initial niceties, and invitation to join us for coffee, the new person looked at us and asked a question that sounded so archaic and so unexpected that we had no answers for it: How do you two know each other? This innocuous question threw us both off the loop because we didn’t have an immediate answer.

Nishant Shah's article was published in the Indian Express on July 5, 2012

How do we two know each other? My story would begin with Livejournal — a community-based blogging platform that was popular in the early Noughties and was the first large-scale digital network I belonged to, and where I spoke with and befriended people writing in that closed social network. My friend probably pins it down to Twitter and how our blogging-friendship solidified through the charms of 140-character direct messages. There is another story somewhere, that we discovered later, when we added each other on Facebook and realised that we have a few close friends in common. Over the last many years, we have also worked together on a couple of projects, have caught up IRL (In Real Life) whenever we visit each others’ cities — Mumbai and Bangalore — and have thought of ourselves as friends, without trying to form a narrative that identifies the point of origin.

When you compare this state of being, which is increasingly the default mode of being for many young people who cement their relationships through digital connections, with how we used to get to know people even two decades ago, we know that things have changed dramatically. For the longest time, the act and fact of knowing somebody was to find physical, material and communitarian similarities — filters that allowed us to hobnob with others like us. Of course, we were always progressive and cosmopolitan, but a quick sweep of any social circle would show that we were mostly confined to people who shared common stories with us. Sometimes these stories were of material proximity, we grew up in the same neighbourhoods, went to the same schools, etc. Sometimes these stories were of class and affordability, we belonged to the same clubs and hung out at similar places. Sometimes these stories were about an imaginary sameness, of religion, community, family etc.

If there is a truly democratising principle that the digital revolution brought to the fore, it can be seen in this destabilising of an older world order, where we are quite comfortable in coexisting and embracing those who are unlike us. I do not mean this to be a celebratory moment where the flat, non-discriminatory and inclusive societies are finally being built. Indeed, the digital networks have their own set of filters that eventually allow us to connect only with people of the same ilk. If you are online in India, you are necessarily talking to people who speak in a particular language and speak it in a particular way. Grammar, diction, fluency, references to global cultural icons and productions, consumption-based lifestyles, all betray the different locations (physical or otherwise) that people come from and serve as extremely strong filters to determine who we connect with.

This, sometimes, even translates into gadget snobbery. For example, a young friend told me that she finds it impossible to connect with people who don’t have a BlackBerry phone because she doesn’t know how she can sustain relationships without being constantly in touch through the BlackBerry Messenger. Similarly, the celebration of social applications like Instagram, which were available only to iPhone users, warns us that there are severe economic, social, cultural and political prejudices that abound in cyberspaces.

However, in the middle of these complications, digital natives are not only a mobile-wielding generation, but also a mobile generation. They are fluid, not necessarily tied to the geographies of their origin, and often imagine themselves, as travelling across different networks and systems, like the information traffic on the internet. This dislocation of the fixity of where we are from and who we are, is one of the most exciting results of the digital turn. The fact that we are able to not only step out of these older networks, which are often entrenched in old-world politics that perpetuate mindless discrimination, but also fabricate new communities and collectives that bring together a diversity, for me, is heartening. While these new social forms will have their own set of problems — gendered, social, linguistic and class-based — they are also the new forms of our socio-cultural being. And there is hope that as the physical translates into the digital, there is a possibility of reconfiguring our pasts and recycling them for more collaborative and shared futures.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/across-borders

A Refreshing Start!

praskrishna — 2011-04-01T16:49:44Z

Parmesh Shahani enters the New Year inspired by the various ideas he’s been exposed to in The Hague and Lavasa.

The time between December and January is the time to hit the ‘re’ button. Re-fresh. Re-start. Re-think. Re-imagine. One’s own self as well as the world around us. It is the time for new ideas. The year is just beginning and everything is possible. I decide to spend this time by taking a short learning break away from the Radia tapes, 2G scams, WikiLeaks and what have you.

My first stop is Amsterdam where I go to museum hop for exactly one day. My friends are surprised when I tell them that I’m not doing any weed, and that, yes, I’ve seen it but no, the red light district isn’t really my thing. “Well, you can’t really say you’re in Amsterdam,” declares a particularly wise one to me over Facebook.

I politely disagree. My visit is intensely enjoyable and I manage to pack in the Anne Frank House (very moving, especially if you’ve read the diary, and who hasn’t?), Rijksmuseum’s famed Rembrandt masterpieces as well as the Van Gogh Museum (indescribably moving, despite the line of tourists) all in one day. It helps that I am staying at the super luxurious Sofitel The Grand. The renovated 16th century royal guest house is full of heritage listed heirlooms showcasing Amsterdam’s history dating back to 1578, so my art tour continues even after I return from my outside excursions.

Not for too long, because I quickly have to rush to The Hague, where Nishant Shah and Sunil Abraham (who together run the Centre for Internet and Society in Bengaluru, and are in my mind, two of the smartest people living in India right now) have collaborated with the Dutch organisation Hivos to put together a thinkathon on ‘Digital Natives with a Cause?’ This is the third event in a series on technology, youth and engagement, that began in Taipei, moved on to Johannesburg, and will finally end in Santiago, Chile this coming February.

Nishant and Hivos’ fabulous Fieke Jansen set the tone by talking about why the question mark at the end of the title ‘Digital Natives for a Cause?’ is important. Can one think of digital natives as simply youth who have grown up with technology or can we include other older people within this term? What does it mean talking about digital natives and questions of transformation and change? What does it mean to even have a cause? Does a cause have to be framed in certain language? I discuss and debate all of this and much more with an incredible group of change-making activists, policy makers and artists from all over the world.

These include folks like Prabhas Pokherel from UNICEF Kosovo, Eddie Avila from Rising Voices Bolivia, Dorothy Okello from the Women of Uganda Network, and Simeon Oriko from the Kuyu Project in Kenya. I’m fascinated by all that they are doing. Kuyu, for instance, aims to teach young African students how to use various forms of social media to make a positive impact in their communities, through online Wikis, mobile phone networks and digital training camps. Nonkululekho Godana’s uniquely South African fashion sense catches my eye and we discuss shopping during the fun dinners, each of which is at a spectacular location in The Hague. Our thinkathon venue is the Museum of Communication, which itself is very special, with its talking installations and special multimedia galleries.

Being here gives me a chance to meet Sam Gregory from Witness, Peter Gabriel’s organisation and website that trains and equips individuals across the world to use video to document human right violations and effect change. I’ve been a big fan of what they’re doing ever since they started. It’s also great to hang out with Ushahidi’s Juliana Rotich, even if it’s only for a little while. Ushahidi develops free open source software for information collection, visualisation and interactive mapping that anyone can use to further their cause. For example, Vote Report India – that catalogued the 2009 general elections – was built on this platform.

I am extremely happy with the quality time I share with co-TED fellow Jasmeen Patheja. I’m sure that you’ve heard of her Blank Noise Project; it is a physical and virtual artistic intervention that aims at creating public awareness about eve teasing. See http://blog.blanknoise.org/ or the image of one of their Bengaluru park interventions that accompanies this column. Jasmeen has just returned from Tokyo where she’s been cataloguing Japanese women’s stories about harassment. Together, we roll our eyes at how similar men all over the world are!

At the thinkathon, a hot topic of discussion is slactivism or slacker activism that a lot of social media seems to be promoting. Is signing an online petition the same as protesting on the ground, in real life? How might we conceptualise a button clicker as an agent for social transformation? Beyond this, how might we engage digital natives in terms of policy-making processes?

I mull over all these questions on my crazy 30-hour journey from snow-bound The Hague to the artificially created city of Lavasa on the outskirts of Pune. Jetlagged as hell, I make it just in time for the first talk of the INK India conference. Compared to last year’s TED, I find everything to be smaller at INK, including the audience. The Bollywood night with Kunal Ganjawala, for instance, has about 20 people dancing in front of the stage as opposed to the 100 or so from last year. And, there are problems galore, with the poorly organised transportation, constantly crashing sound system, and general organisational chaos.

I’ve been a Lavasa sceptic ever since I heard about the project and now that I’m finally visiting, I see my worst fears have been realised. It feels like being on the set of the Truman show, with the fake looking lake, pastel coloured houses, and ever-smiling and possibly ever-afraid staff members. It seems like, at least to me, that they have been trained to not draw attention to themselves, to forcibly ‘invisibilise’ themselves, lest they prick the bubble of the middle-class fantasy of an idyllic foreign-like ‘home’. I continue to be surprised as to why the conference organisers would chose a location like this to host a conference that aims to showcase the best of innovation and knowledge. The court cases against Lavasa that are being flashed on the national news even while INK is taking place, don’t really help very much in making me change my views.

But despite the logistical hiccups and weird choice of location, INK still manages to score for me on the sheer power of its excellent speakers, and I’m glad to have been there. Where do I begin, even with the highlights? Should I tell you about James Cameron’s effortless charm, as he offers his 3D cameras to Indian filmmakers who might want to play with them? Deepak Chopra’s incredible mind on display making connections between the sub-atomic and the Vedic? Phillipe Starck’s sense of humour and his overall design genius that he wears so lightly on his oh-so French sleeves?

How about Jennifer Aaker’s incredible talk that begins with an emotional story about a bone marrow transplant, loops into a campaign to improve the number of registered South Asian bone marrow donors, and ends with her understanding of what happiness is? Or Matt Groening’s video of his father doing basketball throws, backward, while he tells us just why he named Homer Simpson’s character after him?

Just like with TED last year, the Indian speaker contingent is very inspiring. Toy inventor Arvind Gupta is a livewire on stage as he rapidly shows us one toy after the other, made from material like newspapers, old CDs, straws, matchsticks, and pencils. Clay innovator Mansukhbhai Prajapati shows us the clay filters and fridges that he makes for poor consumers in India that need such products but cannot afford their conventional avatars. Commonwealth 4x400 relay gold medallist Ashwini Akkunji recounts how her athletic career started out by running after cattle in her village in Karnataka. Conductor George Mathew talks about how a New York mugging in which he was almost beaten to death became a music lesson after his muggers found his metronome in his pocket.

Anand Kumar, founder of the ‘Super 30’ classes in Bihar that train impoverished rural youth to get into the IITs, gets a standing ovation. It is good to catch up with TED stars from last year like India’s youngest headmaster Babar Ali, who is continuing to scale up his school, or Sunita Krishnan, who has used her Google grant money to build an impressive centre for women survivors of violence.

However, my best talk is by Simon Lewis, who has produced films like Look Who’s Talking in Hollywood. Simon shares his personal story of a car crash that almost ended his life but set him off on a quest to rebuild both his mind and body, piece by piece, using technology and willpower every step of the way.

He has meticulously captured this journey in his book Rise and Shine, which you should read this year, if you can. I want to leave you with http://www.thevisualmd.com/, which is a website you should visit. INK speaker Alexander Tsiaras has shared his nine visual rules of wellness here. Check it out and see if you want to follow them in 2011. I certainly do.

Read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/refreshing-start

A lifetime of five years on the internet

praskrishna — 2013-05-20T09:04:28Z

Centre for Internet and Society observes its fifth anniversary on Sunday.

The article by Subir Ghosh was published in DNA on May 19, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted in this.

Five years is a long time in the internet space. The past five years, certainly, has been. And so has it been for the Centre for Internet and Society that completes five years here.

When a group of citizens got together to come under a platform called CIS five years ago, they had wanted to work on policy issues about the internet that had a bearing on society. They, in fact, still do; except that the new media space itself has undergone a metamorphosis. Five years ago social media was just starting off, few people had smart phones, and online speech was not a burning issue.

Sunil Abraham, executive director of city-based CIS, affirms this, and goes on to assert: “Five years ago, privacy was not a mainstream concern. Today, many different actors and stakeholders are interested in the configuration of the draft Privacy Bill. We first warned the public about the draconian measures in the IT Act during the 2008 amendment. Four years later, many more people are familiar with problematic sections and are adopting various strategies to amend the Act and it’s associated rules.”

Likewise, five years ago, people dismissed “shared spectrum” as a pipe dream; today “shared spectrum” is mentioned in the National Telecom Policy. CIS usually thinks ahead, and works on a range of issues.

“For internet adoption in India to grow dramatically from the dismal statistics today, we need to ensure continued access to cheap devices and affordable and ubiquitous broadband,” says Abraham.

“With Ericsson suing Micromax for Rs100 crore, the mobile wars have come to India. If we have to protect innovation in sub-100 dollar devices, we need to configure our patent and copyright policy carefully.”

But since CIS works primarily on policy issues, shouldn’t it have been based in Delhi rather than in Bangalore? “We do have a small office in Delhi. But we are headquartered in Bangalore because we need to keep learning from technologists and the technical community,” explains Abraham.

When an organisation calling itself the Centre for Internet and Society (www.cis-india.org) observes its fifth anniversary, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that many of the activities related to the anniversary celebrations (May 20-23) have precious little to do with the internet, and is more about society itself. And yes, an entire evening is devoted to Kannada. There’s a talk by Chandrashekhara Kambara on ‘Kannada in the modern era,’ and another by UB Pavanaja titled ‘From Palm Leaf to Tablet – Journey of Kannada’.

“We are looking at the complete eco-system. For instance, during the digitalisation of TV in India, what will happen to the internet? Do TV promoting policies undermine the growth of broadband? On the second day we look at the connection between another older technology - cinema and the Internet.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/dna-india-may-19-2013-subir-ghosh-a-lifetime-of-five-years-on-the-internet

A FLASH of Change

praskrishna — 2012-01-03T10:22:18Z

A fortnightly column on ‘Digital Natives’ authored by Nishant Shah is featured in the Sunday Eye, the national edition of Indian Express, Delhi, from September 2010 onwards. In this article published on February 6, 2011, Nishant Shah writes that citizens are organising, congregating, acting and thereby creating revolutions.

Imagine you are in your favourite mall, walking around, looking at familiar shops, staring at the latest fashions in the windows, chatting with your friends and scouting for food. And suddenly, a bunch of people, who were just there, as a part of the larger scene, start dancing. They churn out well orchestrated but easy-to-replicate moves and for the length of a song, they convert the mall into an impromptu dance floor and then disperse. Or how about when walking through a park, you suddenly see a crowd of young and old, coming together to have a vigorous pillow fight and then after a few minutes of riotous laughter, they disappear into the blue? What would you do if you were faced with something like this in the expected and safe environments that you are used to?

The next time you see something like this, remember that you have just seen a flash mob. Organise, congregate, act, disperse — that is the anatomy of a flash mob. It is a form of mobilisation where anonymous strangers, who are connected via mobile and Web-based communication structures, come together in public spaces to perform a series of pre-determined actions for a brief period of time. They are generally fun, create a lot of confusion for those not in the know, and infuse everybody with a sense of wonder. They fuel conversations by transforming regular places with something that is new and unexpected.

I was recently at the Godrej India Culture Lab in Mumbai, to speak about digital natives, flash mobs and how they have the potential to change the world. Flash mobs are often seen to be frivolous and seen to achieve “mere fun” more than anything else. While I do want to make a case for how “mere fun” is actually the strongest means of political subversion and protest, something else erupted that made us all spectators of History (with the capital H) in the last two weeks.

In Egypt, tens of thousands of protesters came out into the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, Suez, and other cities, to demand the overthrow of an authoritarian government that has been unable to meet the needs of its citizens. In a dramatic unfolding of events, starting on January 25, young people in Egypt used Facebook, Twitter, SMS, emails and other forms of digital communication to come together in an unprecedented show of protest on the streets.

What has happened in the last few days is now the stuff of legend. There were digital blackouts and information blockages. The internet was blocked in the country so that protesters would be left in the dark. Mobile phone companies and internet service providers were ordered to debilitate the entire communication infrastructure so that word would not spread — within or outside Egypt. But such is the strength of the digital medium that the signal was lost, but the voice survived. It found echoes and resonances around the world. In a matter of hours, “Egypt” and “Jan 25” emerged as the most tagged messages on Twitter, with more than 2,500 tweets per second. The civic hackers in Egypt found supporters around the world, who not only spread their message but also provided them with legal and political infrastructure to make sure that their voice was heard.

This revolution, in the first month of the second decade of the 21st century, is not only about the present but also about what the future will hold. The young — digital natives who are integrated with the circuits of technology mobilisation and networking — were able to use these platforms to fight for their rights for freedom, dignity and expression. And all this was orchestrated using viral networking technologies and digital communication assemblages. I do not want to go into analysing Egypt’s politics, but I do want to highlight that the democratic citizen-driven future is already here.

The ways in which digital natives are able to harvest the technologies of mass communication and outreach are an indication of how the contours of global governance are going to be shaped. Citizen journalism, citizen action and civic collaboration are the new weapons of social change and transformation that the young are able to use effectively. Across the world, flash mobs like these bring together virtual strangers in spaces of physical solidarity. True, a lot of them are fun and games. But in participating in these playful structures, digital natives also develop new cultures of trust, belonging, participation, collaboration and mobilisation that remind us that we do not inherit the world from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. And they now have the power to ask us questions for which we might not always have the answers.

Original article was published by Indian Express

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

A digital native coordinating digital natives

tettner — 2011-09-22T11:31:15Z

It’s been about a month since I got to Bangalore, “The Garden City”, and I joined the Center for Internet and Society, with whom I had been talking since late April. At CIS, I’ve been coordinating a project called “Digital Natives with a Cause?” DN is an international (which means I get to travel), collaborative (which means I get to talk to a lot of people) research (which means I get to use my brain) project. So far, being involved with DN has proven to be a very interesting affair, because the exercise has revealed aspects which I had not originally thought to be a part of this experience. I am 23 years old, grew up in Venezuela, studied in the US and now work in India. My understanding of reality is deeply informed by the approach I take to and my engagement with the internet. Being connected to the cloud has become a central part of my persona, a defining aspect of my personality and a central component of my goals in life. I am what my bosses would call a Digital Native, and my job is part of a greater global effort to document how people like myself engage with political and social questions in emerging information societies. My job is to basically study myself. Ok, maybe that is a bit too simplistic, but it is not entirely false. As a digital natives coordinating a social project which aims to document how digital natives engage with social projects I feel like I am part of a M.C Escher painting. I think Douglas Hofstadter will appear to me in a dream one of these days and explain to me how I am just part of infinite loops of DN projects aiming to document DN projects aiming to document DN projects and so on. Maybe it is DN projects all the way down and not turtles. Maybe my project is a meta-project, similar to how Google is not a website but a meta-website (in the sense that it is not a website in itself, but a tool through which one interacts with other websites). These are the kind of thoughts that occur to a digital native tasked with reflecting about himself from 9 to 5.

Whatever the philosophical framework you choose to apply to my situation, there are some cools aspects worth discussing. First, I do get to use myself as a case study. Whenever I have to think how the people with whom I am working with think, all I have to do is think like I would. Secondly, I am privileged enough to learn about myself. I like to use development approaches to describing social transformations, so I like concepts like access to resources, livelihoods, empowerment, decision-making abilities etc. From this stand, digital natives are revolutionizing pre-information age paradigms and shattering off-line civic and political expectations. I find it impossible not to draw parallels between my own life and these greater societal shifts that have been occurring in the last 20 years. Getting to see myself and my identity from a greater, more complex and perhaps more intellectually refined point of view, in which my composition is not a random occurrence but the precise result of multiple developmental processes occurring in the societies where I grew up is, a fantastically eye-opening exercise. This does have its downsides, for sometimes I reach the disappointing conclusion that some of my thoughts are not original: my ideas are not a product of my hard work and creativity; they’re the deterministic result of societal forces greater than me.

Either way, I see the validation of the importance of my project in my own life. If a 23 year old man whose mother language is not English can become a research coordinator in India, anything is possible in this day and age. We are planning an international workshop in South Africa, where digital natives from all over Africa will get a chance to meet, interact, and learn about their social projects. I sorted through over 400 applications, and the end result was a sense of awe and hope, for the amount of young people utilizing the internet and mobile technologies for social and political causes was staggering. If my job is to work with these incredibly talented and driven young men and woman, in a collaborative effort to better understand how they (of should I say we?) are creating new landscapes of action to bring forth development in the world, then I am in a good place.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/a-digital-native-coordinating-digital-natives

10th International ISTR Conference

praskrishna — 2012-08-05T08:03:28Z

The 10th international ISTR conference was organised by ISTR at Universita Degli Studi Di Siena in Italy from July 10 to 13, 2012. Nishant Shah gave a lecture on Beyond Normative Citizenships: Exploring the ‘New’ in Digital Activism.

Nishant Shah spoke as a panelist in the panel "Theoretical Grounding of Civic Driven Change".

This Tenth International Conference of ISTR marks the 20th anniversary of the formation of this global community of scholars and interested others dedicated to the creation, discussion, and advancement of knowledge pertaining to the Third Sector and its impact on human and planetary well-being and development internationally.

In this era of far-reaching changes in the way that societies are organized, the Third Sector is playing a critical role and has significantly gained importance in many countries. Democratization and the role of civil society in social integration and participation are in the spotlight with recent mobilizations particularly in the Middle East and ongoing suppression of civil society under authoritarian regimes in parts of the world. New media, social networks and other technological innovations raise new opportunities and challenges for organizing collective action and the diversity of civil society. Marketization and its impact on the Third Sector is attracting renewed research interest as welfare budgets are cut and the role of nonprofits is called into question in difficult fiscal times in many nations. A second type of marketization is also attracting attention particularly the growth of corporate social responsibility (CSR), the emergence of social enterprises and changing philanthropic paradigms. International research toward a better understanding of the implications of these changes continues to gather momentum.

ISTR’s Tenth International Conference in Sienna, Italy offers an excellent opportunity for further dialogue on these and other changes in an environment of rigor, reflexivity, authenticity and creativity. Siena encapsulates a mix of tradition and innovation that is woven from ancient webs of social engagement and enduring beliefs in justice through periods of peace and conflict. It provides an excellent setting to explore the role of third sector studies as an integrative science with short and long term objectives geared towards understanding and addressing societal concerns. Three exciting plenary sessions will canvas major theoretical and practice developments in the Third Sector and highlight the rich history and accomplishments of the host nation’s Third Sector.

See the event details on ISTR website
Read the program supplement for ISTR's 10th International Conference

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/istr-conference

5 Challenges for the Future of Learning: Digital Natives and How We Shall Teach Them

praskrishna — 2012-04-30T13:04:26Z

At the Digital Media and Learning Conference on beyond education technologies, Nishant Shah gave a ignite talk on 5 Challenges for the Future of Learning: Digital Natives and How We Shall Teach Them on March 1, 2012. There was an author's table where he presented and shared the Digital AlterNatives books and info-kits.

Thursday, March 1, 2012 – 4:30-5:45 (Cyril Magnin Ballroom)

Kea Anderson from SRI International
How do you know it's working?: The U.S. Dept. of Education's new Evidence Framework

Doug Belshaw, Purpos/ed
Why we need a debate about the purpose(s) of education

Tessa Joseph-Nicholas, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The Zombies and the Revolution: Making Science Fiction Matter in the Digital Culture Classroom

Peter Kittle, Cal State Univ., Chico
Good Memes, Bad Teaching

Crystle Martin, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Interest-Based Crap Detecting

David Cooper Moore, Temple University
What Did Rebecca Black's "Friday" Teach Us About Media Literacy?

Chad Sansing, Central Virginia Writing Project
I used to be a middle school teacher like you until I took an arrow in the knee

Rafi Santo, Indiana University
Why Kids Need to Know How to Hack: Technological Citizenship and the New Civic Education

Nishant Shah, Centre for Internet and Society
5 Challenges for the future of learning: Digital Natives and how we shall teach them

Saturday, March 3, 2012 – 3:30-4:30 (Cyril Magnin Ballroom)

Heather Braum, Northeast Kansas Library System
Learning from Birth to the Grave @ Your Library

Mel Chua, Purdue University, and Sebastian Dziallas, Olin College
Teaching Open Source: Productively Lost For Great Justice

Ben Chun, Galileo Academy of Science & Technology
Programming for Every Subject

Jane Crayton, UNM, CU Boulder, STEM-A
iSTEMart

Mizuko Ito, University of California, Irvine
Occupy Learning

Henry Jenkins, USC
The Samba School Revisited: Play, Performance, and Participation in Education

Chris Lawrence, Hive Learning Network, NYC
Throw a learning party!

Heather Mallak, Girls, Math & Science Partnership, Click! Spy School
Opening things with your teeth

Jesse Pickard, MindSnacks
How to Make Your Educational Game Not Suck

Philipp Schmidt, Peer 2 Peer University
How to make an online course in 5 minutes

Jeff Sturges, Mt Elliott Makerspace
Makerspaces

Hsing Wei, Eyebeam and New Visions
DTC Lab = teachers + technologists + designers = digital prototypes in 3 months

Venue: Wyndham Parc 55 Hotel, San Francisco, CA 94102

Click on the original here

Video

The video is also featured in YouTube

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/ignite-talks

"Digital Natives with a Cause?" newsletter Volume I

tettner — 2015-05-15T11:44:19Z

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

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

Links in The Chain - Volume I

Links in The Chain - Volume I issue II

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

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