Centre for Internet and Society

Exposing the Invisible - Tactical Tech films screening at CIS

purba — 2013-12-02T07:37:21Z

Exposing the Invisible is Tactical Tech's series of short films examining some inspiring and provocative investigative cases, those that go beyond traditional journalistic investigations. CIS is pleased to invite you to a special screening of two of the films on 9th December, 6pm, at the CIS venue.

Exposing the Invisible is Tactical Tech's series of short films examining some inspiring and provocative investigative cases, those that go beyond traditional journalistic investigations.

In the past decade, the work of investigators has undergone a significant transformation due to the rapid development of new technologies, the ubiquity of the Internet, and new possibilities in working with evidence, data and visualisation. The stories in the film illustrate this evolution as activists take advantage of this new wave of opportunities, while remaining aware of the dangers they expose themselves to.

Episode one, Our Currency is Information, introduces the work of a team of investigators led by Romanian reporter Paul Radu, investigating organised crime. The film takes you to the heart of Radu’s investigations, where the power of criminals, corporations and governments overlap in chilling cases.

Episode two, From Our Point of View, profiles three individuals from the UK, Lebanon and Israel, non-specialists who have taken it upon themselves to use information in innovative and varies ways to shed light on Syria's 'YouTube conflict', the theft of Lebanon's seashore, and house demolitions in East Jerusalem.

Episode three, Unseen War, touches on the issues of US drone strikes in Pakistan.

More about the project here:

https://exposingtheinvisible.org/

CIS is very excited to participate in the week-long global films festival and will be organizing screenings of Episode one and Episode three on December 9, 2013. The screening of the films will be followed by an interactive discussion on the cases shown in the film, how activism is transforming in India, and how it effects us.

We look forward to your participation in making this event a success!

Venue: http://osm.org/go/yy4fIjrQL?m=

Tactical Tech Hompage: https://www.tacticaltech.org/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/exposing-the-invisible-tactical-tech-films-screening-at-cis

Between the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism

nishant — 2015-05-14T12:14:04Z

In this peer reviewed research paper, Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen draws on a research project that focuses on understanding new technology, mediated identities, and their relationship with processes of change in their immediate and extended environments in emerging information societies in the global south. It suggests that endemic to understanding digital activism is the need to look at the recalibrated relationships between the state and the citizens through the prism of technology and agency. The paper was published in Democracy & Society, a publication of the Center for Democracy and Civil Society, Volume 8, Issue 2, Summer 2011.

Introduction

The first decade of the 21st century has witnessed the simultaneous growth of the Internet and digital technologies on the one hand and political protests and mobilization on the other. As a result, some stakeholders attribute magical powers of social change and political transformation to these technologies.

In the post-Wikileaks world, governments try to censor the use of and access to information technologies in order to maintain the status quo (Domscheit-Berg 2011). With the expansion of markets, technology multinationals and service providers are trying to strike a delicate balance between ethics and pro6ts. Civil society organizations for their part, are seeking to counterbalance censorship and exploitation of the citizens’ rights. Within discourse and practice, there remains a dialectic between hope and despair: Hope that these technologies will change the world, and despair that we do not have any sustainable replicable models of technology-driven transformation despite four decades of intervention in the 6eld of information and communication technology (ICT).

This paper suggests that this dialectic is fruitless and results from too strong of a concentration on the functional role of technology. The lack of vocabulary to map and articulate the transitions that digital technologies bring to our earlier understanding of the state-market-citizen relationship, as well as our failure to understand technology as a paradigm that defines the domains of life, labour, and language, amplify this knowledge gap.

This paper draws on a research project that focuses on understanding new technology, mediated identities, and their relationship with processes of change in their immediate and extended environments in emerging information societies in the global south (Shah 2009). We suggest that endemic to understanding digital activism is the need to look at the recalibrated relationships between the state and the citizens through the prism of technology and agency.

Context

It is appropriate, perhaps, to begin a paper on digital activism, with a discussion of analogue activism[1] (Morozov 2010). In the recent revolutions and protests from Tunisia to Egypt and Iran to Kryzygystan, much attention has been given to the role of new media in organizing, orchestrating, performing, and shaping the larger public psyche and the new horizons of progressive governments. Global media has dubbed several of them as ‘Twitter Revolutions” and “Facebook Protests” because these technologies played an important role in the production of :ash-mobs, which, because of their visibility and numbers, became the face of the political protests in di)erent countries. Political scientists as well as technology experts have been trying to figure out what the role of Twitter and Facebook was in these processes of social transformation. Activists are trying to determine whether it is possible to produce replicable upscalable models that can be transplanted to other geo-political contexts to achieve similar results,[2] as well as how the realm of political action now needs to accommodate these developments.

Cyber-utopians have heralded this particular phenomenon of digital activists mobilizing in almost unprecedented numbers as a hopeful sign that resonates the early 20th century rhetoric of a Socialist Revolution (West and Raman 2009). (ey see this as a symptom of the power that ordinary citizens wield and the ways in which their voices can be ampli6ed, augmented, and consolidated using the pervasive computing environments in which we now live.

In a celebratory tone, without examining either the complex assemblages of media and government practices and policies that are implicated in these processes, they naively attribute these protests to digital technologies.

Cyber-cynics, conversely, insist that these technologies are just means and tools that give voice to the seething anger, hurt, and grief that these communities have harboured for many years under tyrannical governments and authoritarian regimes. They insist that digital technologies played no role in these events — they would have occurred anyway, given the right catalysts — and that this overemphasis on technology detracts from greater historical legacies, movements, and the courage and efforts of the people involved.

While these debates continue to ensue between zealots on conflicting sides, there are some things that remain constant in both positions: presumptions of what it means to be political, a narrow imagination of human-technology relationships, and a historically deterministic view of socio-political movements. While the objects and processes under scrutiny are new and unprecedented, the vocabulary, conceptual tools, knowledge frameworks, and critical perspectives remain unaltered. They attempt to articulate a rapidly changing world in a manner that accommodates these changes. Traditional approaches that produce a simplified triangulation of the state, market and civil society, with historically specified roles, inform these discourses, “where the state is the rule-maker, civil society the do-gooder and watchdog, and the private sector the enemy or hero depending on one’s ideological stand” (Knorringa 2008, 8).

Within the more diffuse world realities, where the roles for each sector are not only blurred but also often shared, things work differently. Especially when we introduce technology, we realize that the centralized structural entities operate in and are better understood through a distributed, multiple avatar model. For example, within public-private partnerships, which are new units of governance in emerging post-capitalist societies, the market often takes up protostatist qualities, while the state works as the beneficiary rather than the arbitrator of public delivery systems. In technology-state conflicts, like the well-known case of Google’s conflict with China (Drummond 2010), technology service providers and companies have actually emerged as the vanguards of citizens’ rights against states that seek to curb them.

Similarly, civil society and citizens are divided around the question of access to technology. The techno-publics are often exclusive and make certain analogue forms of citizenships obsolete. While there is a euphoria about the emergence of a multitude of voices online from otherwise closed societies, it is important to remember that these voices are mediated by the market and the state, and often have to negotiate with strong capillaries of power in order to gain the visibility and legitimacy for themselves. Additionally, the recalibration in the state-market-citizen triad means that there is certain disconnect from history which makes interventions and systemic social change that much more difficult.

Snapshots

We draw from our observations in the “Digital Natives with a Cause?”[3] research program, which brought together over 65 young people working with digital technologies towards social change, and around 40 multi-sector stakeholders in the field to decode practices in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between technology and politics.

The first case study is from Taiwan, where the traditionally accepted uni-linear idea of senders-intermediaries-passive receivers is challenged by adopting a digital information architecture model for a physical campaign.[4] The story not only provides insight into these blurred boundaries and roles, but also offers an understanding of the new realm of political intervention and processes of social transformation.

As YiPing Tsou (2010) from the Soft Revolt project in Taipei explains, "I have realised how the Web has not only virtually reprogrammed the way we think, talk, act and interact with the work but also reformatted our understanding of everyday life surrounded by all sorts of digital technologies."

Tsou’s own work stemmed from her critical doubt of the dominant institutions and structures in her immediate surroundings. Fighting the hyper-territorial rhetoric of the Internet, she deployed digital technologies to engage with her geo-political contexts. Along with two team members, she started the project to question and critique the rampant consumerism, which has emerged as the state and market in Taiwan collude to build more pervasive marketing infrastructure instead of investing in better public delivery systems. The project adopted a gaming aesthetic where the team produced barcodes, which when applied to existing products in malls and super markets, produced random pieces of poetry at the check-out counters instead of the price details that are expected. The project challenged the universal language of barcodes and mobilized large groups of people to spread these barcodes and create spaces of confusion, transient data doubles, and alternative ways of reading within globalized capitalist consumption spaces. The project also demonstrates how access to new forms of technology also leads to new information roles, creating novel forms of participation leading to interventions towards social transformation.

Nonkululeko Godana (2010) from South Africa does not think of herself as an activist in any traditional form. She calls herself a storyteller and talks of how technologies can amplify and shape the ability to tell stories. Drawing from her own context, she narrates the story of a horrific rape that happened to a young victim in a school campus and how the local and national population mobilized itself to seek justice for her. For Godana, the most spectacular thing that digital technologies of information and communication offer is the ability for these stories to travel in unexpected ways. Indeed, these stories grow as they are told. They morph, distort, transmute, and take new avatars, changing with each telling, but managing to help the message leap across borders, boundaries, and life-styles. She looks at storytelling as something that is innate to human beings who are creatures of information, and suggests that what causes revolution, what brings people together, what allows people to unify in the face of strife and struggle is the need to tell a story, the enchantment of hearing one, and the passion to spread it further so that even when the technologies die, the signal still lives, the message keeps on passing. As Clay Shirky, in his analysis of the first recorded political :ash-mob in Phillipines in 2001, suggests, "social media’s real potential lies in supporting civil society and the public sphere — which will produce change over years and decades, not weeks or months."

Propositions

These two stories are just a taste of many such narratives that abound the field of technology based social transformation and activism. In most cases, traditional lenses will not recognize these processes, which are transient and short-lived as having political consequence. When transformative value is ascribed to them, they are brought to bear the immense pressure of sustainability and scalability which might not be in the nature of the intervention. Moreover, as we have seen in these two cases, as well as in numerous others, the younger generation — these new groups of people using social media for political change, often called digital natives, slacktivists, or digital activists — renounce the earlier legacy of political action. They prefer to stay in this emergent undefined zone where they would not want an identity as a political person but would still make interventions and engage with questions of justice, equity, democracy, and access, using the new tools at their disposal to negotiate with their immediate socio-cultural and geo-political contexts.

In their everyday lives, Digital Natives are in different sectors of employment and sections of society. They can be students, activists, government officials, professionals, artists, or regular citizens who spend their time online often in circuits of leisure, entertainment and self-gratification. However, it is their intimate relationship with these processes, which is often deemed as ‘frivolous’ that enables them, in times of crises, to mobilize huge human and infrastructural resources to make immediate interventions.

It is our proposition that it is time to start thinking about digital activism as a tenuous process, which might often hide itself in capillaries of non-cause related actions but can be materialized through the use of digital networks and platforms when it is needed. Similarly, a digital activist does not necessarily have to be a full-time ideology spouting zealot, but can be a person who, because of intimate relationships with technologized forms of communication, interaction, networking, and mobilization, is able to transform him/ herself as an agent of change and attain a central position (which is also transitory and not eternal) in processes of social movement. Such a lens allows us to revisit our existing ideas of what it means to be political, what the new landscapes of political action are, how we account for processes of social change, and who the people are that emerge as agents of change in our rapidly digitizing world.

About the Authors

NISHANT SHAH is Director-Research at the Bangalore based Centre for Internet and Society. He is one of the lead researchers for the “Digital Natives with a Cause?” knowledge programme and has interests in questions of digital identity, inclusion and social change.

FIEKE JANSEN is based at the Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation (Hivos). She is the knowledge officer for the Digital Natives with a Cause? knowledge programme and her areas of interest are the role of digital technologies in social change processes.

References

Domscheit-Berg, Daniel. 2011. Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website. New York: Crown Publishers.

Drummond, David. 2010. “A New Approach to China.” Available at: http:// googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html.

Godana, Nonkululeko. 2011. “Change is Yelling: Are you Listening?” Digital Natives Position Papers. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://www.hivos.net/content/download/ 40567/260946/file/Position%20Papers.pdf. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

Knorringa, Peter. 2010. A Balancing Act — Private Actors in Development, Inaugural Lecture ISS. Available at: http://www.iss.nl/News/Inaugural-Lecture-Professor-Peter-Knorringa. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. New York: Public Affairs.

Shirky, Clay. 2011. “The Political power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change.” Foreign Affairs 90, (1); p. 28-41.

Shah, Nishant and Sunil Abraham. 2009. “Digital Natives with a Cause.” Hivos Knowledge Programme. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://cis-india.org/research/dn-report. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

Tsou, YiPing. 2010. “(Re)formatting Social Transformation in the Age of Digital Representation: On the Relationship of Technologies and Social Transformation”, Digital Natives Position Papers. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://www.hivos.net/ content/download/40567/260946/file/Position%20Papers.pdf. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

West, Harry and Parvathi Raman. 2009. Enduring Socialism: Exploration of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation. London: Berghahn Books.

End Notes

[1]Morozov looks at how ‘Digital Activism’ often feeds the very structures against we protest, with information that can prove to be counter productive to the efforts. The digital is still not ‘public’ in its ownership and a complex assemblage of service providers, media houses and governments often lead to a betrayal of sensitive information which was earlier protected in the use of analogue technologies of resistance.

[2]Following the revolutions in Egypt, China, worried that the model might be appropriated by its own citizens against China’s authoritarian regimes, decided to block “Jan25” and mentions of Egypt from Twitter like websites. More can be read here: http://yro.slashdot.org/ story/11/01/29/2110227/China-Blocks-Egypt-On-Twitter-Like-Site.

[3]More information about the programme can be found at http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/ Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause.

[4]Models of digital communication and networking have always imagined that the models would be valid only for the digital environments. Hence, the physical world still engages only with the one-to-many broadcast model, where the central authorities produce knowledge which is disseminated to the passive receivers who operate only as receptacles of information rather than bearers of knowledge. To challenge this requires a re-orientation of existing models and developing ways of translating the peer-to-peer structure in the physical world.

Cross-posted from Democracy & Society, read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/stirrup-and-the-ground

The Rules of Engagement

nishant — 2015-04-24T11:48:54Z

Why the have-nots of the digital world can sometimes be mistaken as trolls. I am not sure if you have noticed, but lately, the people populating our social networks have started to be more diverse than before.

Nishant Shah's column was published in the Indian Express on October 29, 2012.

Oh, sure, we are still talking about a fairly middle-class hang-out that happens largely in English and is restricted to people in urban environments who have the economic and cultural capital of access. But if you browse through your friends’ lists and compare it with, say, the network from five years ago, you will realise that the age demography has changed quite dramatically. I am not suggesting that the Web was only the realm of the young – let us face it, the people who actually created the infrastructure of the Web were not tiny tots. However, with Web 2.0 at the turn of the millennium, we have had an extraordinary focus on young people online.

But as the networks grow to include more people, there are now a lot of people online, who might not be the 16-year-old BlackBerry-wielding digital native, nor be in the “business of internet” but are finding a space for themselves, tentatively and steadily negotiating with this new space. Some of it might be because, those of us who were new kids on the block in the Nineties, are now older by a decade and are still on the block, but replaced by newer kids around the block. Some of it might be because there is an ease of access as portable computing devices grow more personal and get more people to use their smartphones as a gateway into the online worlds. But a lot of it is actually because the fold of the Web is expanding. The digital spaces of conversation are being integrated into our everyday lives and practices, replacing older forms of media and information structures and processes of social and cultural belonging.

And so, even though the penetration of the interwebz is not as rapid in countries like India as one would have hoped for, we do see a wide age group of people coming online, forming networks, and entering into conversations. I hadn’t really realised this, even though I was adding them to my social networks, that the digital immigrants are now here, and they are here to stay. It suddenly surfaced in my thoughts, because I recently heard a few narratives which made me dwell on the effort and the learning that one takes for granted but is a prerequisite for belonging to these new social spaces.

One of the first complaints I heard was about a hostility that many digital immigrants face when they start engaging with the social media. They follow the manuals. They read the FAQs. They look at patterns, and learn. And yet, even when they seem to be doing what seems to be exactly what everybody else is doing, they are often told that they got it all wrong. This is bewildering for many, because they cannot really see the difference. And the reason is that the social web is governed by a whole lot of unwritten rules and codes, which clearly are the rites of passage into the online world. These are not things that can be taught. These are not written in a guideline that tells you how to behave on Facebook or how to sift through the live-streams on Twitter. It is a fiercely guarded set of dos and don’ts which clearly distinguish between the digital natives and the digital immigrants, reinforcing exclusivity and exclusion. And when the digital immigrant violates these rules, they are often faced with a sneer, a sarcastic comment, or a dismissal as “not with it”.

The second thing I have repeatedly noticed is “calling troll” to people who do not always know these rules. Trolling is not new to the world of the internet. People who disrupt conversations and discussions by posting provocative or tangential information, by voicing hateful opinions, by passing harsh judgments, or sometimes by willfully breaking the rules of the communities, in order to seek attention and interrupt the flow of conversations are called trolls. Trolls are universally frowned upon and trolling wars often take up epic proportions because people get emotionally invested in them. Trolls are often shamed publicly, their mistakes brought into an embarrassing spot-light and ridiculed in back-channels or even in public discussions.

Calling somebody a troll presumes that the user is conversant with the rules of the game and is then breaking them, working with the idea that if you are online, you are naturally a digital native. The digital immigrants often create noob mistakes that can appear troll-like but are not intended to be so, and are often on the receiving end of a community’s hostility. And it is time, now that our online networks are growing, for us to realise that our presumptions about who is online need to change. If we are looking at an inclusive Web, we need to stop imagining that the person on the other side of the interface is necessarily like us, and develop new networks of nurture, which allows the digital immigrants safe spaces to experiment, make mistakes, and learn like the best of us. The next time, before you call somebody a troll, see if it might just be somebody learning the tricks of the trade. If they are doing something wrong, just politely point it out to them. And remember, acceptance is not only for people who are like us, but about people who are markedly unlike us.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/india-express-news-nishant-shah-oct-29-2012-the-rules-of-engagement

Political Economy, Activism and Alternative Economic Strategies

praskrishna — 2013-08-05T05:59:45Z

The fourth annual conference in political economy was organized by the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University of Rotterdam at the Hague from July 9 - 13, 2013.

Nishant Shah participated as a speaker and presented the paper on Citizen Action in the Time of Network. Click to read the full details of the conference here.

About the Conference

The financial crisis revealed its first signs over five years ago, on August 9, 2007, when BNP Paribus suspended payment on three of its funds. It has since morphed into the deepest US and then world economic crisis since the Great Depression. The “green shoots” of recovery of some Third World economies, that the IMF had acclaimed in 2010, had withered within a year. By 2012 it was admitted that the “world recovery had stalled”, as even the handful of large, better-performing, developing economies slowed. But, ever upbeat except when imposing adjustment, the IMF predicts not only an improved 2013 but continual yearly growth over the following four years as well.

Yet, the world’s largest economy remains stuck. While even the weak economic growth in the USA looks good by comparison with Europe, measured unemployment remains around 8%. Home loss, homelessness, poverty and hunger remain at their highest levels in decades. Nor is there a prospect of a recovery across Europe. The northern economies, and especially Germany, that until now have performed better in the core- periphery division of the continent, have stagnated, inevitable perhaps given the prolonged implosion of the economies of their most important foreign customers. There is a particularly severe crisis of youth unemployment. And the stagnation of the economies of the First World has caused a sharp slowing of growth in their BRIC counterparts and the few other better-performing Third World economies that the recovery Pollyannas had projected for several years as the engines that would drive the world rebound. Popular discontent has manifested itself in varieties of ways, from the Arab Spring to the renewal of Latin American left radicalism. In the global North, it has erupted in the form of the movements of the Indignados in Spain, Occupy Wall Street in the USA, and popular resistance in Greece. Whilst the Greek political system has been transformed beyond recognition but without resolution of the ongoing economic and political crisis, action in the rest of the North has appeared to have limited lifespan and effects, even with polls showing very high dissatisfaction with the current economic and political situation. It is striking how no broadly supported political movements have arisen, successfully promoting and engaging in a struggle for alternative economic policies. And, in their absence, finance has slowly , if not rapidly, and surely restored its economic, political and ideological hegemony over everything from our daily lives to our longer-term prospects, from the environment to our social and economic prospects.

The ongoing economic and political crises place two related questions on history’s agenda. In the face of the dismal failure of the continuing, mostly overt neoliberal policies to resolve the deep problems, what alternative economic strategies should be pursued? And a more radical form of that same question, are alternative economic structures and an entirely different system of economic structures and practices necessary? The second question is concerns the sorts of actions that must be engaged to move the political process on to a path of alternative outcomes, from mild reforms to major transformation (and the connection between the two).

The 2013 Annual Conference of IIPPE will focus on these questions. In doing so, it will need to acknowledge: the breadth and depth of discontent and the more or less spontaneous protest and conflict against the consequences of the crisis; how struggles have been conditioned by the crisis and the failure to resolve it without either determining their form and strength, their diversity and their complex dependence on non-economic factors; and the lack of strength, unity and coherence of oppositions and posing of alternatives. In this light, the conference will bring together scholars from all strands of political economy and heterodox economics, in seeking to engage debate with political parties and other progressive organisations in order to explain the incidence of struggles and how they might best be supported in bringing about broader, deeper and more unified responses to the crisis. In particular, it will be necessary to interrogate how continuing general conceptualisations, such as financialisation and neoliberalism, can (or cannot) be put to these purposes, when set against the diverse experiences of, and response to, the crisis.

Read the original published at the IIPPE website.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/iippee-july-8-2013-fourth-annual-conference-in-political-economy

Call for Applications: 'Maps for Making Change' - Using Geographical Mapping Techniques to Support Struggles for Social Justice in India

anja — 2015-10-05T15:04:12Z

Deadline: 20 November 2009. Maps for Making Change is a two-month project specifically designed for activists and supporters of social movements and campaigns in India. It provides participants with an exciting opportunity to explore how a range of digital mapping techniques can be used to support struggles for social justice. It also allows you to immediately develop and implement in practice a concrete mapping project relevant to your campaign or movement, with full technical support. Interested in joining us? Send in your application by 20 November 2009.

Background

Most of us think of maps as representations of territory. But have you ever wondered why bastis, slums, unauthorised colonies and monuments of minorities and poor people rarely are given prominence on maps – or at times are even absent altogether? All too often only seats of power, such as big hospitals, the colonies of the rich and diplomatic missions, receive detailed mention. This is because maps simultaneously also function as representations of relations of power and control: which places, communities, historical monuments, townships, colonies and roads are highlighted on a map reflects the power and control that various communities and classes possess or lack. In modern times, this is particularly obvious in planning processes, which incorporate maps as crucial tools in villages and cities alike. To challenge the practice of privileging the powerful on maps, and to create maps from the margins and of margins, therefore has emerged as an important aspect as well as a tool of our fights against injustice in society.

Maps for Making Change

Today, with the emergence of new technologies such as GPS and the Internet, mapping techniques have advanced beyond the confines of professional cartographers and can be mobilised and used to fight for social justice by anyone with an interest in maps. Are you someone concerned with the state of social justice in the country today? Are you working closely, as an activist or a supporter, with a campaign or social movement? Are you interested in exploring how digital geographical mapping techniques might help facilitate or support your advocacy and awareness raising campaigns and understanding of the power relations in society? Perhaps you already have some ideas on how maps can fit into your work, but you require technical support to put these into practice? Then this is for you.

Maps for Making Change is a two-month project that will provide you with the opportunity to explore how mapping can be used to support your campaigns, struggles and movements to fight against injustice. It is jointly organised by the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore) and the Tactical Technology Collective (Bangalore and London), and brings together activists and technologists. Over the course of the project, participants will:

explore and share ideas about the possible uses of geographical maps within the context of campaigns and movements in India;
try out a range of mapping tools and get training and support in the creation and use of maps;

develop and implement your own mapping project, involving the creation and use as well as dissemination of maps, relevant to your campaign's or movement's advocacy and goals.

Format

Maps for Making Change will take the form of three workshops, with time in between each for participants to work on a mapping project of their choice. The first workshop will take place in Delhi on 3 December, and will be an introductory event, where tools and tactics will be explored and discussed and participants can determine the nature of the information they need to collect to implement their own mapping project. The second workshop will take place over 3 days during the first week of January (exact dates and location to be decided), and will involve actual work on mapping projects, using data and other resources collected by participants in the intervening time. The third workshop will be a two-day event during the first week of February (exact dates and location to be decided), and will be the time for participants to provide overall feedback, as well as to do the final touches on the projects and launch them. Not only during the workshops, but throughout the two-month project period, and at every stage of the development of your project plan, technical support will be available to help participants make your ideas a reality.

The organisers will cover travel and accommodation expenses of those who are selected to participate in the project. There is no participation fee. By applying, applicants commit themselves, however, to devoting the necessary time to this project. Where relevant, an organisational commitment to allow you to do this would also be required.

Who should apply?

This is an event for activists and supporters of movements and campaigns based in India. Preference will be given to applicants that intend to use the project directly for their work within a campaign or movement. Applications are welcomed from individuals, but also from groups of people who are working within the same campaign or movement and who would like to develop and implement a mapping project together. Those who have been centrally involved in designing and implementing communication strategies of campaigns and movements are particularly encouraged to apply, but such a role is not at all a prerequisite to be part of Maps for Making Change. Participants from appropriate backgrounds who simply want to explore the technology and its uses without immediately implementing it will be welcome in so far as space allows.

We would like to also encourage applications from students who are involved with campaigns or movements and who would like to learn these skills so as to use them in their advocacy efforts. Students will be provided with special assistance during the programme.

All participants should have some familiarity with computer use. While more advanced technology skills are useful, they are not essential: technology support will be provided as required for all participants to ensure that everyone completes their own mapping project.

Regretfully, we will be able to accommodate translation only from Hindi to English and vice versa, so applicants will need to be comfortable with either of these languages.

How to apply

Please answer the questions below in Hindi or in English. You do not need to write long responses (up to 300 words max), but please provide us with enough information to understand your involvement in and commitment to campaigns or movements for social justice, as well as your skills and interest. We also would like to know why you want to be part of the Maps for Making Change project and what are some of the contributions (of whatever kind) you could make to it.

You can send your answers by email to maps4change@cis-india.org, or by post to:

Maps for Making Change

c/o Centre for Internet and Society

No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers

14, Cunningham Road

Bangalore 560052

The last day for applications is 20 November 2009. Early applications will make us very happy though! :)

Application Questions:

Please provide answers to all the following questions.

1) Basic personal information:

Name:
Gender:
Date of birth:
Nationality:
Affiliation/organisation:
E-mail address (if available):
Telephone and emergency contact number(s):
Preferred language of communication:
Veg/non veg:
Anything else we should know about you (allergies, medical condition, special needs):

Are you applying individually or as part of a team? If as part of a team, please provide the names of the other team members here;

2) Where are you from, where do you live now, and what is your current movement/organisational affiliation (movement/organisation you work with, its mission, position you have within it, is your organisation a non-profit, etc.)?

3) What is your wider experience of working with campaigns or movements for social justice? What kinds of initiatives have you been involved in? What kind of responsibilities have you taken up within these?

4) Have you been involved with any technology projects for non-profit organisations or campaigns or movements for social change? If so please briefly explain your experience (what worked, what didn't, what did you like, what not, etc?) and your role within the project. If you haven't been involved with such a project, please explain why you are interested in exploring the use of technology for social change.

5) Why are you interested in joining Maps for Making Change in particular? How can you and your movement/organisation benefit from your participation?

6) Do you already have an idea in mind that involves using maps for social change and that you would like to develop into a project that can support the work of the campaign or movement that you are involved with? If so, please explain.

7) To help us better understand the kind of technical support we will need to provide during Maps for Making Change, please describe your current technical expertise and ability.

8) All participants are encouraged to teach as well as to learn. What kind of contribution to the group's learning do you think you could make?

If you require more information about the project or about the application process, please email us at maps4change@cis-india.org, or call us at 080 4092 6283.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

The Maps for Making Change Team

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/advocacy/other-advocacy/maps-for-making-change

Maps for Making Change Kicks Off, and You Can Get Involved!

anja — 2015-10-05T15:03:39Z

A first in India, Maps for Making Change explores the use of geographical mapping techniques to support struggles for social justice in India. On 3 December, the project officially kicks off during a one-day workshop in Delhi. But even if you can not be there with us in Delhi, there are ways to get involved.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/advocacy/other-advocacy/maps-for-making-change-kicks-off-and-you-can-get-involved

When Whistle Blowers Unite

sunil — 2012-03-21T10:17:48Z

Leaking corporate or government information in public interest through popular Web service providers is risky but Wikileaks.org is one option that you could try out.

Leaking corporate or government information in public interest in the age of Satyam has new challenges. You couldn't just upload it to a blog, social networking website or even a document management system like Google documents. Google, Yahoo and most other Web service providers nearly always comply with the national law and cooperate with enforcement agencies. In India there have been several arrests in connection with alleged illegal email messages and content on social networking websites. It did not take court order – just a request from the local police station. Furthermore, you would have to undertake additional risky activity online to draw media attention to your documents. Also those who stand to lose from the leak can send a couple of copyright take down notices which will lead to deletion. So your only real option is Wikileaks.org, where they boast: Every source protected. No documents censored. All legal attacks defeated.

Launched in December 2006, Wikileaks.org stands alone on the Internet as the last refuge for the truth. Even though the promoters are European and US academic organisations, journalists and NGOs – a near neutral point of view is realised by sparing no one across the political and ideological spectrum. It is the archive of the whistle-blowers of the world and it is ugly: login information and private emails of a holocaust denier, secret documents from the Church of Scientology, Internet block-lists from Thailand and standard operating procedures for US guards at Guantanamo Bay, et cetera. One could safely assume that these guys have very few friends. Unlike Wikipedia.org whose technology it employs, Wikileaks does not have an open and participatory editorial policy. It accepts documents through a trusted journalist–source system.

Leaking controversial documents can result in loss of job, limb and life, so extreme caution is always advised. Remember that India still does not have laws protecting whistle blowers, in spite of a bill being introduced in 2006. What follows is only a very rough guide to digital whistle blowing, so please get expert advice before you try these at home:

Download and install military grade encryption software like Pretty Good Privacy. Generate a pair of keys – a public and a private one. Use your private key in combination to a journalist's public key to send him or her, a 'for your eyes only message' email. Only the journalist will be able to decrypt the message using your public key and his private key. Note however, that an Indian court under the 2008 amendment of the IT Act can ask you to disclose your key-pair.
Step outside. Working from home is a bad idea since DOT mandates that all ISPs retain logs for all users and for all services utilized for an indeterminate time-period. Office is still worse as your network administrator might be also logging your activities.
Find an anonymous public access point. Cyber-cafes, especially in New Delhi, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu are asking users to provide identity cards and record contact details and in some cases web-cam photographs as well. Using your laptop in a coffee shop may work but DOT is considering cracking down on open wifi networks.
Use an anonymizing service so that the chain of digital evidence leading up to Wikileaks is obliterated. TOR is the anonymizing solution of choice. Several TOR servers that provide private tunnels across the Internet work in unison, to form a cloud of anonymity.

If you were leaking large amounts of data, uploading it may be too risky. Burn the data on DVDs and mail them to Wikileaks. However, do ensure that all digital files have been purged of personal information. For word files this can be done by converting to PDF. Also you may not want to leave any finger-prints on the package. India will soon have a database of finger prints thanks to the National Unique Identity (NUID) project. We know this thanks to the leaked NUID project document on Wikileaks.org, days before the consultation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/whistle-blowers-unite

Digital Natives Workshop in Taipei: Only a Few Seats Left!!!

praskrishna — 2011-08-04T10:29:26Z

The Centre for Internet and Society in collaboration with the Frontier Foundation is holding a three day Digital Natives workshop in Taipei from 16 to 18 August, 2010. The three day workshop will serve as an ideal platform for the young users of technology to share their knowledge and experience of the digital and Internet world and help them learn from each other’s individual experiences.

Everybody has a story to tell, and with the Internet, it is possible to tell the story and be heard. Young people around the world use digital technologies to find a voice, an expression, a creative output and a space for dialogue. Gone are the days when the young were only to be seen and not heard. In the Web 2.0 world, the young are seen, heard and are making a dramatic change in the world that we live in.

As Internet and digital technologies become more widespread, the world is shrinking, time is replaced by Internet time, we are constantly connected and intricately linked to our contexts, our people, our cultures and our networks. And you, yes YOU are a part of this change. In fact, as Digital Natives – people who have found technologies as central to their lives – you are directly affecting the lives of many, sometimes even without knowing about it.

An Open Call for Participation

The Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India) in collaboration with the Frontier Foundation (Taipei, Taiwan) are calling out to young technology users to share stories about how they have tried to change things around them with the use of digital and Internet technologies. Conversely, if you feel that the presence of these technologies has significantly changed you in some way, we want to hear about that too! These can be stories where you have made a significant impact by initiating campaigns or movements for a particular cause, stories where you have used technologies to cope with problems in your personal and social life through your online persona in the virtual World Wide Web or stories where a small blog you started, or a facebook group you created, or a plurk network that you started, or a discussion group that you participated in, led to a change that has a story to tell.

The three day workshop will select 20 participants from all around Asia and in the Middle East to come and share these stories, to interact with facilitators and scholars who have worked in different countries and areas, and to form a network of collaboration and support. We will give your stories a face, a voice and a platform where they can be heard in your own voice, in your own style and in your own formats. Participants can fill in an application form (as given below) and forward it to digitalnatives@cis-india.org by 15th July 2010.

Simultaneously a website will also be hosted online where the Digital Natives will contribute to the content. Selected participants will be encouraged to document in it. Expenses relevant to the project will be granted to the selected participants.

Application Form

Name:
Gender:
Age:
Primary language of communication:
Other languages you can read and write:
Email:
Postal address:
Describe your Internet related experience / initiative(s) in 300 words. Furnish with URLs where necessary. Optionally, if images and videos are part of the description, then upload them in a high resolution version to a secure website and provide the URL.
Write in a few sentences about your expectation from the workshop.
I declare that the above information is true to the best of my knowledge.
I agree that Digital Natives will use the material I have provided for public use.

Please note that the information you provide will be kept for purposes of the Digital Natives project. Materials which you submit will be used for reporting to sponsors and for public use relevant to the project.

Dates: 16, 17 and 18 August, 2010
Venue: Taipei (Taiwan)

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

Beyond the Digital: Understanding Digital Natives with a Cause

maesy — 2012-03-13T10:43:37Z

Digital natives with a cause: the future of activism or slacktivism? Maesy Angelina argues that the debate is premature given the obscured understanding on youth digital activism and contends that an effort to understand this from the contextualized perspectives of the digital natives themselves is a crucial first step to make. This is the first out of a series of posts on her journey to explore new insights to understand youth digital activism through a research with The Blank Noise Project under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge Programme.

The last decade has witnessed an escalating interest among academics, policy makers, and other practitioners on the intersection between youth, activism, and the new media technologies, which resulted in two narratives: one of doubt and the other of hope. The ‘hope’ narrative hinges on the new plethora of avenues for activism at the young people’s disposal and the bulge of the population, stating that the contemporary forms of youth activism represent new ways of conceiving and doing activism in the present and the future (see, for example, UN DESA, 2005). The ‘doubt’ narrative, on the other hand, questions to what extent the digital activism can contribute to broader social change (Collin, 2008) and some proponents of this view even call it ‘slacktivism’, stating that online activism is only effective if accompanied with real life activism (Morozov, 2009).

Before assessing the potentials of youth’s digital activism to contribute to social change, it is imperative to first gain a comprehensive understanding about this emerging form of activism. A brief review of existing literature on the topic found that most of the analyses are centered on three perspectives, each with its own approach, strengths, and weaknesses: the technology centered, the new social movements centered, and the youth centered perspectives.

The technology centered perspective places a great emphasis on the instrumental role of the internet and new media (see, for instance, Kassimir, 2005; Shirkey, 2007; Brooks and Hodkinson, 2008). It discusses how internet savvy young people are able to exercise their activism differently, because the technology can remove obstacles to organizing, provide a new platform for visibility and make transnational networking easier. In this perspective, the Internet and new media technologies are seen as enabling tool sand the web is viewed as a new space to promote activism. However, this perspective mainly stipulates that there is already a formulaic form of activism that can be transferred from the actual, physical sphere to the virtual arena; it does not consider that the changes caused by the way the youth are using technologies in their daily lives may also create new meanings and forms of activism. This perspective is the most dominant in literature on the topic, being the lens used by the pioneering studies on youth, Internet, and activism.

The new social movements centered perspective goes beyond that and looks at how new meanings and forms of politics and activism are created as the result of the way people are using new media technologies and the Internet. This perspective is leading the recently emerging literature on the topic and emphasizes on the trend of being concerned on issues related to everyday democracy and the favour towards self organized, autonomous, horizontal networks (for examples, see Bennett, 2003; Martin, 2004; Collin, 2008). However, this perspective treats young people merely as ‘vessels’ of the new activism and neglect to examine how their lives have been shaped by the use of new media technologies and the Internet.

The youth centered perspective, represented for example by Juris and Pleyers (2009), acknowledges that ICTs have always been part of young people’s lives and that it intersects with other factors in shaping how they conceive politics and activism. Most of the studies in this perspective were done with youth activists in existing transnational social justice movements, such as the global anti-capitalism or environmental movements. Nevertheless, this perspective mainly views youth activists as ‘becomings’ by defining them as the younger layer of actors in a multi-generational group that will be future leaders of the movement. There are very few researches on autonomous youth movements that are created and consist of young people themselves and look at the youth as political actors in its own right. In addition, the majority of studies also focused on the youth as individuals but not as a collective force.

In addition to the shortcomings of each perspective, there are also common gaps in the current broader body of knowledge on the intersection of youth, new media technologies, and activism.

Firstly, existing researches tend to define activism as concrete actions, such as protests and campaigns, and the values represented by such actions. It neglects other elements that constitute activism together with the actions and values, such as the issue taken up by the action, the ideologies underlying the formulation of action, and the actors behind the activism (Sherrod, 2005; Kassimir, 2005). Divorcing these elements from the analysis gave only a partial view of what youth digital activism is.

Secondly, the majority of studies zoomed into the novelty of new media technologies and how they are being used as a point of departure to investigate the topic. This arguably stems from an adult-centric, pre-digital point of view, which overlooks the fact that internet and new media has always been ‘technology’ for most young people just as how the radio and television have always been ‘technology’ for the previous generation (Shah and Abraham, 2009). This way of thinking divorces the ‘digital’ from the ‘activism’ in digital activism; consequently, it ignores all the other factors that are causing and shaping youth activism and fails to capture how youth actors themselves are viewing or giving meaning to this digital activism.

Finally, researches on the issue skew excessively on developed countries. It must be acknowledged that the ‘digital divide’, or the unequal access to and familiarity with technology based on gender, class, caste, education, economic status or geographical location, in developing countries is deeper and that the digitally active youth are a privileged minority. Yet, a neglect to understand their activism also means a failure to understand why and how the elite who are often perceived to be politically apathetic are engaging with their community to create social change.

The weaknesses identified above demonstrate that our understanding on this particular form of contemporary youth activism is currently obscured. Hence, the two narratives of ‘hope’ and ‘doubt’ lose their relevance given that the subject of assessment, the digital youth activism, is not even clearly understood.

Based on the above overview of the limitations, it is imperative to find a new way to approach to understand the phenomenon of digital youth activism. I will explore the possibilities of such an approach with the following arguments as the starting point.

Firstly, I argue that the key limitation lies on the adult-centric perspective in viewing youth’s engagement with new media technologies, thus what is essential is to go beyond the ‘digital’ and focus on the ‘activism’ part of youth digital activism. Secondly, I argue that exploration of the issue from the standpoint of the youth political actors themselves is crucial to counter the adult-centric perspective dominating the literature on this topic. Thirdly, since so many researches divorce the youth from the context of their activism, it is crucial to focus on a particular case study to a tease out the nuances of youth digital activism.

I have the opportunity to explore the approach through a study with The Blank Noise Project, an initiative to address the problem of street sexual harassment in public spaces that originated in 2003 in Bangalore. It has since expanded into nine cities in India with over 2,000 volunteers, all young people between 17-30 years of age. Known for their unique public art street interventions as well as their savvy online presence, The Blank Noise Project was also chosen because its growth and sustainability over the past seven years are a testament to its legitimacy and relevance for youth in India.

The research does not aim to assess the contribution of The Blank Noise Project to social change nor does it claim to represent all forms of youth digital activism in India. Rather, it aims to offer insights on one of the forms of digital natives joining forces for a cause. The research is interested in the following questions: how do young people involved in the Blank Noise articulate their politics? Who are their audience? What are their strategies? What is their conception of the public sphere? How do they organize themselves? How do they represent themselves to others? How do they see and give meaning to their involvement with the Blank Noise? How can we make sense of their initiative? While ‘activism’ is the popular term that is also used in this research, is their initiative a form of activism or is it something else altogether? More importantly, how do these young people define it by themselves? For the next few months, I will share stories, questions, and reflections that emerge along my journey of exploring those questions with The Blank Noise Project on the CIS blog.

This is the first 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 The Blank Noise Project under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge Programme.

References:

Bennett, W.L. (2007) ‘Changing Citizenship in the Digital Age’, paper presented at

the OECD/ INDIRE Conference on Millenial Learners, Florence, Italy (5-6 March).

Brooks, R. and Hodkinson, P. (2008) ‘Introduction’, Journal of Youth Studies Vol. 11:5,

p. 473 – 479

Collin, P. (2008) ‘The internet, youth participation policies, and the development of

young people’s political identities in Australia’, Journal of Youth Studies Vol. 11:5, p. 527 - 542

Juris, J.S. and Pleyers, G.H. (2009) ‘Alter-activism: Emerging cultures of participation

among young global justice activists’, Journal of Youth Studies Vol. 12 (1): p. 57-

75.

Kassimir, R. (2006) ‘Youth Activism: International and Transnational’, in Sherrod,

L.R., Flanagan, C.A. and Kassimir, R. (eds.) Youth Activism: An International

Encyclopedia, p. 20-28. London: Greenwood Press.

Martin, G. (2004) ‘New Social Movements and Democracy’, in Todd, M.J. and Taylor,

G. (eds.) Democracy and Participation: Popular protests and new social movements, p. 29-54. London: Merlin Press.

Morozov, E. (2009) ‘The brave new world of slacktivism’. Accessed 19 May 2010 <

http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/05/19/the_brave_new_world_of_slacktivism>

Shah, N. and Abraham, S. (2009) ‘Digital Natives with a Cause? A Knowledge

Survey and Framework’. Accessed 7 April 2010 < http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause/News/New-Publication-Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause>

Sherrod, L.R. (2006) ‘Youth Activism and Civic Engagement’, in Sherrod, L.R.,

Flanagan, C.A. and Kassimir, R. (eds.) Youth Activism: An International

Encyclopedia, p. 2-10. London: Greenwood Press.

Shirkey, C. (2008) Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens and People Come

Together. New York: Penguin Books

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs / UN DESA (2005)

‘World Youth Report 2005: Young People Today and in 2015’. Accessed 7 April 2010 <http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unyin/documents/wyr05book.pdf>

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

Digital Natives : Talking Back

nishant — 2015-05-15T11:50:19Z

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

Press Release

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

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

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

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

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

Political is as Political does

nishant — 2011-08-04T10:30:51Z

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

The researcher in his heaven, all well with the world

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

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

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

Questioning the Question

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

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

Political as dialogue

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

Political as concern

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

Political as change

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

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

Political as Freedom

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

Political as Reticence

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

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

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

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

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

Digital Natives Workshop in South Africa - Call for Participation

tettner — 2011-08-04T10:31:05Z

The African Commons Project, Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society have joined hands for organising the second international workshop "My Bubble, My Space, My Voice" in Johannesburg from 07 to 09 November 2010. Send in your applications now!

An Open Call for Participation

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

The organisers are calling out to young users of technology to join this global conversation. The three-day workshop will focus on how the young people use the tools and platforms at their disposal to create social change in their environments. We want to hear from you: If you have used digital technologies to respond to problems, crises, or needs in your community or social circles, we want to hear your story. These can be stories where you have made a significant impact by initiating campaigns or movements for a particular cause, stories where you have used technologies for learning, sharing, exchanging and disseminating information, stories where you have either organized or been part of a digitally organized event (online or offline) such as a petition or campaign, or stories where you used social media like blogs, social networks, discussion group, etc., which led to an interesting social outcome.

We invite you to share your perspectives in an informal conversation with people having a similar approach from the neighbouring community. The workshop will involve participants from around Africa, who will be guided by facilitators in an interactive and engaging dialogue. Results from the workshop will be used to establish a network of collaboration and support for Digital Natives.

Participants can register by filling in an online application form by 12 October 2010.

Expenses relevant to the project will be granted to the selected participants. For any questions, concerns or comments please contact digitalnatives@cis-india.org.

Dates: November 07 to 09, 2010
Venue: Johannesburg, South Africa

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/workshop-in-south-africa

First Thing First

maesy — 2011-08-04T10:31:48Z

Studies often focus on how digital natives do their activism in identifying the characteristics of youth digital activism and dedicate little attention to what the activism is about. The second blog post in the Beyond the Digital series reverses this trend and explores how the Blank Noise Project articulates the issue it addresses: street sexual harassment.

To try to understand youth digital activism is to first understand what the issue it deals with is all about. This point is made clear by the 13 people involved in Blank Noise, who all started our conversation with a discussion on eve teasing, the issue that Blank Noise deals with and the reason for its existence. Taking the hint from them, I start sharing my research journey by sharing how Blank Noise thinks of the issue it takes. As I recall our conversations, I am still amazed by how everyone, regardless of whether they have been involved as an initiator of a 15-day Facebook campaign or as a coordinator for five years, share the following articulation

‘Eve teasing’ is a euphemism in English that refers to the various forms of sexual harassment experienced by women in public places, be it parks, streets, or buses. It takes different forms, ranging from staring, verbal lampooning, accidental jostling, or outright groping. While public sexual harassments also occur in almost every place in the globe, the term ‘eve teasing’ itself is particular to South Asia, especially India. The term plays on the biblical Eve that is considered as a temptress, playing on the dichotomy of ‘good and bad’ women and placing the blame on women for enticing men to tease them. The word ‘tease’ itself downplays the severity of the action and making it a trivial, funny, non-issue - so much that it is regarded as a rite of passage into womanhood and ignored by the authorities unless it leads to violent deaths. This term is what Blank Noise seeks to address; it aims to denounce the word ‘eve teasing’ and call it by its appropriate name: street sexual harassment.

While in the popular perception street sexual harassment happen only to young women who dress in Western fashion, actually all women irrespective of age, class, or dress have experienced it. In a much lesser degree, men also experienced street sexual harassment. However, the norms of masculinity deny their victimhood and a typical reaction would be ‘yes, I got felt up but I pity the bugger because he’s gay’ (Blank Noise, 2005).

The root of the problem is how eve teasing is internalized by all members of the society, including women. Laura Neuhaus, a 27 year old American woman who became active in Blank Noise when she worked in Bangalore for a few years, was shocked to find that the senior women in her department, who had PhD degrees and were at the top of their career, turned a blind eye to the harassment they experience and advised her to do the same. Tanvee Nabar, a 19 year old student who was one of the initiators of Blank Noise’s ‘I Never Ask for It’ Facebook campaign, stated that victims may also perpetuate the problem by thinking that accusing themselves of being responsible for the harassment because of the way they dress or behave. She said, “Even by thinking that way I am validating eve teasing, so this needs to stop.”

The problem thrives on the silence of victims, who are further deterred from speaking up by negative reactions ranging from agreeing that it’s a problem but it should be ignored because nothing can be done about it, increased restrictions from protective parents, or even offers to beat up the perpetrator to get even by men relatives or spouses.

However, Blank Noise recognizes that the issue is not as straightforward as it may seem. While some actions like groping are clearly a form of harassment, other forms such as looking or verbal taunting are not as obvious. Therefore, rather than offering a rigid guideline to what is or is not street sexual harassment, Blank Noise attempts to build a definition of ‘eve teasing’ through public polls, both online on its blog and on the streets.

Blank Noise does not advocate for any specific, tangible solution either. It is not proposing for a new legislation or service provision. Many youth experts would say that it is a sign of youth’s decreasing trust to the state, but actually this is an extension of Blank Noise’s acknowledgement of the ambiguity of street sexual harassment. Hemangini Gupta, a 29 years old Blank Noise coordinator, asked, “Should we be allowing the state to legislate an issue like street sexual harassment where there is so much grey even with how it is understood and defined - from ‘looking’ to physical violence?” Instead, Blank Noise aims at creating public dialogue to break the ignorance on street sexual harassment and change the mindset of both men and women, young and old. Blank Noise does not promote a specific course of action for women affected by the harassment either; it promotes the confidence to choose how to react to harassment.

What is unique about Blank Noise from this articulation? Some would argue that Blank Noise is unique for being the first collective that addresses eve teasing, but a closer inquiry into the history of the Indian women movements show that it is widely acknowledged as a form of violence against women. However, perhaps due to the limited resources of the movement, efforts to address eve teasing have been taken up very systematically (Gandhi and Shah, 2002). In this sense, when it was born in 2003, Blank Noise was unique for being the only group whose existence is solely dedicated to address this issue.

Blank Noise is not unique in problematizing the issue of violence against women. The women’s movements in India and elsewhere have been refusing to prescribe any solutions to the victims and identifying patriarchal mindset of both men and women as the root cause either. Yet, it is exceptional in not identifying an opponent or an entity where concrete demands are proposed to push for a tangible progress towards a change of mindset.

Intangible changes are as good as tangible ones. This might be a new characteristic of how digital natives think about their causes, but it could also be more related to their reading of the specific issue they are dealing with. Perhaps, if the issue at hand is climate change, the same people will advocate for specific solutions to the state or promote concrete behavior change. Either way, the message is clear: we need to always take into account what a digital natives activism is about and not just how they do it!

This is the second 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 The Blank Noise Project under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge Programme.

Reference:

Blank Noise (2005) ‘Frequently Asked Questions’. Accessed 21 September 2010. http://blog.blanknoise.org/2005/03/frequently-asked-questions.html

Gandhi, N. and Shah, N. (1992) The Issues at Stake: Theory and Practice in the Contemporary Women’s Movement in India. New Delhi: Kali for Women

Source for the picture: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/group.php?gid=2703755288

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

The 'Beyond the Digital' Directory

maesy — 2015-05-15T11:33:39Z

For the past few months, Maesy Angelina has been sharing the insights gained from her research with Blank Noise on the activism of digital natives. The ‘Beyond the Digital’ directory offers a list of the posts on the research based on the order of its publication.

Have you ever wondered what is really “new” about the activism of digital natives? In May 2010, the Hivos-CIS ‘Digital Natives with a Cause?’ Knowledge Programme started a collaboration The Blank Noise Project in India and Maesy Angelina, a student-researcher from the Erasmus University of Rotterdam – International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague who is taking up the research agenda for her final project to qualify for her Masters degree in International Development with a specialization in Children and Youth Studies.

Maesy has been blogging about the insights she gained from her field work in Bangalore in the CIS website under the ‘Beyond the Digital’ series, which consists of the following posts:

1. Beyond the Digital: Understanding Digital Natives with a Cause

Digital natives with a cause: the future of activism or slacktivism? Maesy Angelina argues that the debate is premature given the obscured understanding on youth digital activism and contends that an effort to understand this from the contextualized perspectives of the digital natives themselves is a crucial first step to make. This is the first out of a series of posts on her journey to explore new insights to understand youth digital activism through a research with Blank Noise under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge Programme.

2. First Thing First

Studies often focus on how digital natives do their activism in identifying the characteristics of youth digital activism and dedicate little attention to what the activism is about. The second blog post in the Beyond the Digital series reverses this trend and explores how Blank Noise articulates the issue it addresses: street sexual harassment.

3. Talking Back without “Talking Back”

The activism of digital natives is often considered different from previous generations because of the methods and tools they use. However, reflecting on my conversations with Blank Noise and my experience in the ‘Digital Natives Talking Back’ workshop in Taipei, the difference goes beyond the method and can be spotted at the analytical level – how young people today are thinking about their activism.

4. Taking It to the Streets

The previous posts in the Beyond the Digital series have discussed the distinct ways in which young people today are thinking about their activism. The fourth post elaborates further on how this is translated into practice by sharing the experience of a Blank Noise street intervention: Y ARE U LOOKING AT ME?

5. The Digital Tipping Point

Is Web 2.0 really the only reason why youth digital activism is so successful in mobilizing public engagement? A look into the transformation of Blank Noise’s blog from a one-way communication medium into a site of public dialogue and collaboration reveals the crucial factors behind the success.

6. Diving Into the Digital

Previous posts in the ‘Beyond the Digital’ series have discussed the non-virtual aspects and presence of Blank Noise. However, to understand the activism of digital natives also require a look into their online presence and activities. This post explores how Blank Noise’s engagement with the public in their digital realm.

7. The Class Question

Blank Noise aims to be as inclusive as possible and therefore does not identify any specific target groups. Yet, the spaces and the methods they occupy do attract certain kinds of volunteers and public. This raises the class question: what are the dilemmas around class on digital interventions? Are they any different from the dilemmas on street interventions?

8. The Many Faces Within

Blank Noise, as many other digital native collectives, may seem to be complete horizontal at first glance. But, a closer look reveals the many different possibilities for involvement and a unique way the collective organize itself.

9. Activism: Unraveling the Term

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.

10. Reflecting from the Beyond

After going ‘beyond the digital’ with Blank Noise through the last nine posts, the final post in the series reflects on the understanding gained so far about youth digital activism and questions one needs to carry in moving forward on researching, working with, and understanding digital natives.

While the posts present bits and pieces of field research notes and reflections from data analysis, the full research products are:

- Angelina, M. (2010) 'Beyond the Digital: Understanding Contemporary Forms of Youth Activism - The Case of Blank Noise in Urban India'. Unpublished thesis, graded with Distinction. The Hague: International Institute of Social Studies - Erasmus University of Rotterdam.

- Angelina, M. (2010) 'Towards a New Relationship of Exchange'. Position paper for the Digital Natives with a Cause Thinkathon.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/the-beyond-the-digital-directory

Talking Back without "Talking Back"

maesy — 2011-09-22T11:37:54Z

The activism of digital natives is often considered different from previous generations because of the methods and tools they use. However, reflecting on my conversations with The Blank Noise Project and my experience in the ‘Digital Natives Talking Back’ workshop in Taipei, the difference goes beyond the method and can be spotted at the analytical level – how young people today are thinking about their activism.

Last August, I had the opportunity to participate in the three-day grueling yet highly rewarding ‘Digital Natives Talking Back’ workshop in Taipei. On the very first day, Seema Nair, one of the facilitators and a good friend, asked us to reflect about what ‘talking back’ means in the context of activism. At first glance, activism is almost always interpreted as a confrontational resistance towards an identifiable opponent over a certain issue - a group of activists protesting against a discriminatory legislation passed by a government, for example. Although this is definitely the most popular form, is this the only way activism could be done?

While reflecting on Seema’s question, I thought of my conversations with people in the Blank Noise Project and how they seem to defy this popular imagination through their efforts to address street sexual harassment. From the way it articulates its issue (I have shared it before in here), Blank Noise challenges the idea of an opponent in activism by refusing to identify an entity as the “enemy” or the one responsible for the issue, given the grey areas of street sexual harassment. The opponent is intangible instead: the mindset shared by all members of society that enables the violation to continue.

Consequently, Blank Noise ‘talks back’ differently. While it is common for many movements to set an intangible vision as its goal (for instance: a society where women is treated as equals with men), they also have a tangible intermediary targets to move towards the broader vision (e.g. a new legislation or service provision for women affected by domestic violence). Blank Noise sticks with the intangible. The goal is to form a collective where eve teasing is everybody’s shared concern, spreading awareness that street sexual harassment is happening every day and it is unacceptable because it is a form of violence against women. Pooja Gupta, a 19 year old art student who is one of the initiators of the ‘I Never Ask for It’ Facebook campaign, underlined this intangible goal by saying that “The goal really is to spread awareness. It is not about pushing any specific agenda or telling people what to do.”

Because of this goal, I initially thought that there is a clear demarcation between people within the Blank Noise and the ‘public’ whose awareness they would like to raise – that there is a clear “us” (the Blank Noise activists) and “them” (the target group). However, I was corrected by Jasmeen Patheja, the founder of Blank Noise, when we chatted one day. “I haven’t ever put it that way. Since the beginning, the collective is meant to be inclusive and there is no specific target group. The public is invited to participate and there is no audience, everyone is a participant and co-creator.”

The strategy for this is to open up a public dialogue. When Blank Noise first started in 2003, it started with the street as the public space and uses art as its method of intervention. It takes many forms: performative art, clothes exhibition, street polls, and many others. Although today Blank Noise is much more known for its engagement with the virtual public through its prolific Internet presence (4 blogs, a Twitter account, 2 Facebook groups, many Facebook events, and a YouTube channel), the street interventions remain a significant part of its activities. Regardless of the methods, which I will elaborate more in future blog posts, the principles of creativity, play, and non-confrontation are always maintained.

At this point, some critical questions could be raised. What is Blank Noise actually trying to achieve through the dialogue? Can public dialogue really address the issue? How does Blank Noise know if it is interventions have an impact?

When I asked the last question, many people in the Blank Noise admitted that impact measurement is something that they are still grappling with. Some said that the public recognition of Blank Noise by bloggers and mainstream media is an indicator; others said that the growth of volunteers is also an impact. However, I found that this is not an issue many people were concerned with and was a bit puzzled. After all, if one were to dedicate their time and energy to a cause, wouldn’t s/he want to know what kind of difference made?

The light bulb for this puzzle switched on when Apurva Mathad, one of Blank Noise male volunteers, said, “Eve teasing is an issue that nobody talks about. It seems like a monumental thing to try and change it, so the very act of doing something to address it and reaching as many people as possible right now seems to be enough.”

Apurva basically told me that it is the action of doing something about the issue is what counts – and that it is the personal level change among people who are active within the Blank Noise is the real impact. I recalled that everyone else I talked with mentioned individual transformation after being a part of Blank Noise intervention – something I would elaborate upon in future posts.

This observation was confirmed in a later conversation with Jasmeen, where I discovered that Blank Noise also has another goal that was not as easy to identify as the first: to allow people involved with the collective to undergo a personal transformation into “Action Heroes” - people who actively takes action to challenge the silence and disregard towards street sexual harassment. In this sense, Blank Noise is similar to many women collectives that became organized to empower themselves and hence could be said to also adopt a feminist ideology.

The difference with most women collectives, however, lies on Blank Noise’s aim to allow a personalization of people’s experience with the collective. “The nature of this project is that people are in it for a reason close to them and they give meaning to their involvement as they see fit,” Jasmeen said.

Blank Noise does face challenges in doing this. Some people found it difficult to understand that an issue could be addressed without shouting slogans or advocating for a specific solution and others joined with anger due to their personal experiences. Hence, the non-confrontational dialogue approach becomes even more important. The discussion and debates it raises help the Blank Noise volunteers to also learn more about the issue, reflect on their experiences and opinions, as well as to give meaning to their involvement. This is when I finally understood the point of “no target group”: the Blank Noise people also learn and become affected by the interventions they performed. Influencing ‘others’ is not the main goal although it is a desired effect, the main one is to allow personal empowerment.

Going back to the ‘talking back’ discussion in Taipei, Seema then shared her experiences working with women groups in India and showed how ‘talking back’ could also be ‘talking with’, engaging people in a dialogue. It need not always address the state; it could also be aiming to make a change at the personal level in everyday life. It could also be ‘talking within’, keeping the discussion and debates alive within a movement to avoid a homogenized, simplification of the activism and provide a reflective element to the action. ‘Talking back’ could also take form other than “talking”, which usually is done through slogans and placards in a street protest, petition, or statements. It could be done through art, theatre performance, and many, many other possibilities.

Blank Noise is definitely an example of these different forms and its experience shows that the difference is not arbitrary. It is based on a well-thought analysis of the issue that extends to how it formulates its objectives which is then translated into its strategies. Blank Noise is not only an example of how activism is done differently, but also on how the thought behind it is different.

As I looked around the workshop room I was reminded that Blank Noise was not the only one. A few seats away from me sat two people who combined technology and poetry to create everyday resistance towards consumerism in Taiwan and a young woman who held urban camps in India to mobilize young people to volunteer Regardless of the issue and the technology used, many digital natives with a cause across the world remind us that ‘talking back’ could be done in many other ways than “talking back”.

This is the third 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 The Blank Noise Project under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge Programme.

*The photo is from one of Blank Noise's interventions in Cubbon Park, Bangalore. You can learn more about this intervention here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/talking-back-without-talking-back