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Book Review: Apocalypse Now Redux
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-nishant-shah-august-6-2016-book-review-apocalypse-now-redux
<b>My review for Arundhati Roy and John Cusack's new book that captures their encounter with Edward Snowden, 'Things that can and cannot be said' is now out. It's an engaging, if somewhat freewheeling, political critique of the times we live in. </b>
<p>The review was <a class="external-link" href="http://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/books/book-review-apocalypse-now-redux-arundhati-roy-john-cusack-2956413/">published in the Indian Express</a> on August 6, 2016.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Book:</b> Things That Can and Cannot Be Said<br /> <b>Authors:</b> Arundhati Roy & John Cusack<br /> <b>Publication:</b> Juggernaut<br /> <b>Pages:</b> 132<br /> <b>Price:</b> Rs 250</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The title of the book — Things That Can and Cannot be Said — demands an imperative. It is as if Arundhati Roy and John Cusack, aware of their internal turmoil in dealing with a world that is rapidly becoming unintelligible, though not incomprehensible, are demanding an order where none exists. Hence, they are advocating for certainty and assurance, only to undermine it, ironically, through their own freely associative writing that mimics linear time and causative narrative. This deep-seated irony of needing to say something, but knowing that saying it is not going to shine a divining light on the sordid realities of the world that is being managed through the production of grand structures like valorous nation states, virtuous civil societies, the obsequious NGO-isation of radical action, and the persistent neutering of justice through the benign vocabulary of human rights, defines the oeuvre, the politics and the poetics of the book. Written like a scrap book, filled with excerpts from long conversations scattered over time and space, annotated by reminiscences of books read long ago that have seared their imprints on the mind, and events that are simultaneously platitudinous for their status as global landmarks and fiercely personal for the scars that they have left on the minds of the authors, the book remains an engaging, if a somewhat freewheeling, ride into a political critique that makes itself all the more palatable and disconcerting for the levity, irreverence and the dark sense of humour that accompanies it.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Composed in alternating chapters, the first half of the book is about Cusack and Roy laying themselves bare. They spare no words, square no edges, and put their personal, political and collective wounds on display with humble pride and proud humility. Cusack’s experience as a screenplay writer comes in handy — he rescues what could have been a long tirade, into a series of conversations. The familiar narratives are rehistoricised and de-territorialised, put into new contexts while eschewing the older ones, thus providing a large landscape that refers to state-sponsored genocide, structural reorganisation of nation states, the dying edge of political action, the overwhelming but invisible presence of capital, and the dithering state of social justice that treats human beings like things. Cusack, identifying the poetic genius of Roy, gives her centre stage, making her the voice in command.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Roy, for her part, seems to have enjoyed this moment in the soapbox — something that she has been doing quite effectively and provocatively to a national and global audience — and gives it her all. There are moments when the text feels indulgent, when the voice feels a little relentless, when the almost schizophrenic global and historical references become a litany of mixed-up events that might have required further nuance and deeper interpretation. However, the whimsical style of Roy’s narrative, with her sense of what is right, and her demeanour that remains friendly, curious and disarming, saves the text from being heavy handed, even when it does dissolve into cloying poignancy and makes you pause, just so that you can breathe.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Surprisingly, it is the second part of the book, where the two encounter Edward Snowden along with Daniel Ellsberg, the “Snowden of the 1960s” who had leaked the Pentagon papers, that falters. Snowden had jocularly mentioned that Roy was there to “radicalise him”. She does that, but in a way that doesn’t give us anything more than what we already know. While Cusack and Roy were committed to getting to know Snowden beyond his systems-man image, there wasn’t much that they could uncover, either in dialogue or in discourse, that could have told us more, endeared us further to possibly the most over-exposed person in recent times. However, one realises that the genius of the narrative is actually in reminding us how transparent Edward Snowden has become to us. We know all kinds of things about this young man — from his girlfriends past to his actions future, from his values and convictions to his opinion on the NSA watching people’s naked pictures — and yet, what has been missing in the Snowden files, has been the larger arc of global politics, social reordering, and perhaps, a glimpse of the post-nation future that Snowden might have seen in his act of whistleblowing that is going to remain the landmark moment that defines the rest of this century.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Once you have gotten over the fact that this is not a book about Snowden, the expectations are better tailored for what is to come, and suddenly, the long prelude to the meeting falls into place. Snowden matches Roy and Cusack in whimsy, irony, political conviction, and the sacred faith in human values that make you want to give them all a fierce hug of hesitant reassurance. What Snowden says, what Roy and Cusack make of it, and how they leave us, almost abruptly at the end, breathless, unnerved, and severely conflicted about some of the 20th century structures like society, activism, nation states, governance, communication, technologies, sharing and caring is what the book has to be read for. The tight screen-writing skills of Cusack meet the perfect timing of Roy’s prose, and all of it becomes surreal, futuristic and indelibly real when it gets anchored on the physical presence of Snowden, who, in exile, talks achingly of the home that has thrown him out and the home that he can never really call his own.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">And while there are lapses — fragments, translations and evocations which might have needed more explanations to have their pedagogic intent shine through — there is no denying that, in all its flaws, much like the narrators, the book manages to first immerse you in the cold shock of a sobering reality, clearly positioning the apocalypse as the now, and then drags you out and wraps you up in a warm blanket, opening up forms of critique, formats of intervention, and functions of political commitment towards saying things that have and have not been said. The book should have, perhaps, been titled what could, would, should have been said, but can’t, won’t, shan’t be said — not because of anything else, but because it seems futile.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-nishant-shah-august-6-2016-book-review-apocalypse-now-redux'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-nishant-shah-august-6-2016-book-review-apocalypse-now-redux</a>
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No publishernishantInternet GovernanceBook Review2016-08-06T04:16:07ZBlog EntryNot Just Fancy Television
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/indian-express-december-8-2012-nishant-shah-not-just-fancy-television
<b>Nishant Shah reviews Ben Hammersley's book "64 Things You Need to Know for Then: How to Face the Digital Future Without Fear ", published by Hodder & Stoughton </b>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">The review was<a class="external-link" href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/not-just-fancy-television/1042040/0"> published in the Indian Express</a> on December 8, 2012.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">Let us begin by acknowledging that when the world was learning how to drive on the information highway, Ben Hammersley was out there, instructing us how to do it best. So it doesn’t surprise that 64 Things You Need to Know for Then: How to Face the Digital Future Without Fear, despite its untweetable title, is quite spot-on when it comes to describing our digital pasts, demystifying our interweb presents and preparing us for technosocial futures. Well-written, interspersed with illustrative anecdotes, reflective experiences and speculative ideas, the book looks at the good, the bad and the downright bizarre that the digital turn has introduced in our lives. Working through moments of nostalgia for things that have already become obsolete, and through experiences that morph even before we can comprehend them, Hammersley writes (or, as he suggests in his introduction — co-writes with hundreds of anonymous contributors) a book that is readable, for those seeking to understand how the digital world moves and those who want to remember their own role in shaping forgotten trends.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The book also attempts to answer some of the troublesome tensions in our understanding of our contemporary digital lives. Hammersley’s basic intention in writing the book is to show how technological shifts are not merely about changing usage patterns. It radically (and often dramatically) restructures our domains of life, language and labour. Older structures have become redundant and the new ones have not yet found their feet. There are many who attempt to think of the internet as a mere extension of older media practices. But as he says, “The internet is absolutely not just fancy television.” It is a technology that is reshaping everything we had understood about who we are and how we relate to the world around us.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">However, Hammersley suggests, the ways in which the internet is rapidly transforming the world leads to a clear divide around technology literacy. The “technologically literate” are shaping the digital turn, experimenting and exploring the possibilities, but unable to fall back upon older structures of assurance to know whether the choices they are making are sustainable. At the same time, the “technologically illiterate” are still responsible for shaping a world that they are quickly losing track of.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This book clearly explains the technological, legal, cultural, social and economic shifts of the last 20 years, and how they foretell our futures, without complicating it with geeky discourses on code or theoretical bluster.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Hammersley also ensures that the book is not merely a glossary of terms. He has the most interesting anecdotes from around the world like Harry Potter fan-fiction and crowdsourced translations in Germany challenging intellectual property rights regimes, the Human Flesh Search Engines in China, which threaten to reinforce regressive mob politics while also enabling cultural vigilantes in our societies. He also goes beyond individual concerns and reflects on the larger political concerns of censorship, control and freedom, discussing with great lucidity, the complicated nuances of hacker groups like Anonymous, political effects of collectives like WikiLeaks, etc. It is an exciting mash-up of events that will make you smile at the audacity and irreverence of the players in the digital playground, but will also make you shiver as it lays bare the new authoritarian and violent regimes that emerge with digital technologies.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Instead of taking partisan positions about something as necessarily good or bad, Hammersley documents some of the practices, effects and affects of technology, to show how our world has changed. There is no explanation of why the list stops at 64 things. But it is a well curated list of social, cultural, economic and political concerns and provides a conversational account of the present and future, speculating, like an old friend on the living room couch on a Sunday afternoon.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The only criticism against Hammersley is that he is too dependent on the rules of the internet to explain the internet. The different laws that have evolved in computing and network theory, in the sociology of the Web and the economic analysis of information societies, are accepted too easily, and used as self-evident explanatory frameworks. But then, this is not a book pretending to argue for a new conceptual framework. It is a book that has set out to educate and entertain, slowly unfolding the fractured narratives of the Web from its military origins to its Arab Spring manifestations. Of the many books that are already flooding the market, trying to decode the Web, Hammersley’s list of 64 things is going to be at the top.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em>The writer is Director (Research), Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore</em></p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/indian-express-december-8-2012-nishant-shah-not-just-fancy-television'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/indian-express-december-8-2012-nishant-shah-not-just-fancy-television</a>
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No publishernishantFeaturedResearchers at WorkBook ReviewDigital Natives2015-04-24T11:45:14ZBlog EntryDeconstructing Digital Natives: Young People, Technology and the New Literacies
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/young-people-technology-new-literacies
<b>Nishant Shah was invited to do a book review of a new anthology 'Deconstructing Digital Natives', edited by Michael Thomas. The review was published in Routledge's Journal of Children and Media on July 18, 2012. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em>Deconstructing Digital Natives: Young People, Technology and the New Literacies</em> is an anthology that revisits the debates and scholarship that have arisen around youth and technology in the last decade or so. It is a timely intervention that invites some of the most influential scholars who have contributed to and shaped the discourse around “digital natives” to come and revisit their original ideas from the last decade. The term “digital native” probably bears witness to the strident discourses that, more often than not, fall into the trap of exotically glorifying or despairingly vilifying young peoples’ engagement with digital technologies. As Buckingham points out in his foreword to the book, these conversations either take up the language of a “generation gap [that] entails a narrative of transformation and even of rupture, in which fundamental continuities between the past and the future have been destroyed” or they guise themselves in an “almost utopian view of technology—a fabulous story about technology liberating and empowering young people, enabling them to become global citizens, and to learn and communicate and create in free and unfettered ways” (p. ix). The essays seek a point of departure from these tried and tested arguments in order to provide a “balanced view” on the topic. And so we have a distinguished author list from the world of digital natives scholarship, coming together not only to ponder on their own contributions to the field and how those ideas need to be upgraded, but also to provide new contexts, concepts, and frameworks to understand who, or indeed, what, is a “digital native,” often in tension with their earlier work.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In its ambition of revisiting existing debates and providing a “research-based approach by presenting empirical evidence and argument from international researchers in the field,” the book succeeds unevenly (p. xi). Despite its efforts to chart a point of departure, some of the essays end up falling into some usual traps. For example, despite the fact that the oldest digital natives are probably in their thirties, they are thought of as being young. They are defined only as “students” within formal learning institutions without looking at the radical potential of learning outside organized education, embedded in their everyday practices. The digital natives remain an object of research and the peer-to-peer structures that are supposed to shape them, but do not feature in the methodologies of researching them. This notwithstanding, the essays still offer a historical and social perspective on the debates around digital natives in certain developed pockets of the world.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In the first section, “Reflecting on the Myth,” Thomas’ essay “Technology, Education and the Discourse of the Digital Native” introduces a tension between the techno-euphorists and the “digital luddites,” which replays itself through the rest of the contributions. While Thomas places himself between “technoevangelism” and “technoskepticism,” Prensky, who coined the term “Digital Natives” in 2001, then introduces to us a new binary of “digitally wise” and “digitally dumb” (p. 4). Prensky reviews the responses that his opposition of “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” have produced over the last decade and emphasizes that his coinage was at the level of a metaphor, and was not to be taken seriously. Prensky agrees that the earlier opposition might be discarded because it evokes too many simple responses based on skills with technology. Digital wisdom, for Prensky, is in the ways in which digital technologies enhance the human brain “to anticipate second- and third-order effects to which the unaided mind may be blind” as the world becomes too complex for the “unenhanced human brain” to cope with it (p. 23). Typically, Prensky’s argument creates a dichotomy of those who can (and will) and those who will be outside of this web of digital enhancements. His analysis tries to complicate the idea of human wisdom by looking at questions of ethics and agency, but the final formulations appear cliche´d, merely re-creating the older tensions rather than thinking through them. Jones’ following essay on the “Net Generation” is more persuasive, where he argues for dismissing the idea that “nature of certain technologies . . . <em>has affected the outlook of an entire age cohort</em> in advanced economies” and instead should unpack how “new technologies emerging with this generation have particular characteristics that <em>afford certain types of social engagement</em>” (p.42).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In the second section, titled “Perspectives,” the essays take up two different tones.The first is about looking at digital literacy, skill, and fluency in everyday practices of digital natives, and how they shape our contemporary and future sociopolitical and cultural landscapes. Banaji, in exploring the EU Civic Web Project, echoes Jones’ ideas. The presumptions within education about an entire generation as “born with technologies” has consequences in the field of civic action, where programs for citizen action are designed with expectations that the young people will have core digital competencies and literacy. She does not push that argument further, but in her study of the two Scottish e-initiatives, one can see the promise of a radical reconstruction of civic engagement movements, where the young participants are not going to be satisfied as mere participators, and will demand a space for their voice to be heard.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Takahashi’s essay on the <em>oyaubibunka</em> (“thumb culture”) mobile generations in Japan stands alone in its analysis of an Asian context—though many might argue that Japan, with its developed economy, can hardly be counted as a typically “Asian” perspective. Takahashi is rooted, both in practice and discourse, in youth and technology in Japan, where the youth often experience close-knit community experiences through mobile interfaces, in their otherwise alienated modern habitats. Almost as a response to Turkle’s Alone Together (2011), Takahashi shows how collaborative and cocreation cultures ranging from the mobile novels on Mixi to everyday interaction on Social Networking Systems is bringing in new kinds of social spaces of belonging. The essay, however, resists simply celebrating this space and works in complex ideas of freedom, control, risks, and the tensions between traditionalization and modernity in Japan.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Zimic and Dalin, writing from a similar heavily connected Nordic region, pose a different set of questions in their essay, “Actual and Perceived Online Participation Among Young People in Sweden.” For Zimic and Dalin, in a space where connectivity can be taken for granted, the further question to ask is not whether digital natives participate online or not, but whether they participate in ways that are expected of “a digital citizen in the information age” (p. 137). Through empirical data and case studies, the essay shows the different kinds of activities that youth engage with and also concludes that though engaging in civic issues is important to the young people’s sense of belonging to participatory cultures, using the Internet does not provide an “automatic guarantee” toward participation, and “assistance is required in order to engage them in relevant activities” (p. 148).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The second set of essays in this section all cluster around the digital native as a student. Locating the digital native within educational institutions, they look at the ways in which the ideas of learning, pedagogy and engagement with the text are changing with the rise of digital technologies. Levy and Michael look at two case studies involving students in Australian high schools, to “facilitate a deeper understanding of products and processes in multimodal text construction,” which they think is core to interactive communication technology literacy skills (p. 85). The data is rigorous and rich, but the conclusions are a bit of a disappointment: digital natives need to better manage their time and resources and they need to learn traditional skills in order to cope with their educational environment.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The trend of an exciting hypothesis and conclusion, which do not necessarily leave you with anything more than what you already knew, continues in this section. Erstad sets out on a journey to see how digital literacy posits challenges to educating the digital generation and ends by suggesting that the digital divide should address questions of “how to navigate in the information jungle on the Internet, to create, to communicate, and so forth” (p. 114). Similarly, Kennedy and Judd want to unravel the mystery of why “students, who are so clearly familiar and apparently adept with Internet tools, are at times so poor at using the Internet academically” (p. 119). Through empirical research and interaction with students, they end up making an argument against the Googlization of everything (Vaidhyanathan, 2011), suggesting that “satisficing strategies” of information search, defined by a need for instant gratification and not looking beyond the first information sets, has produced “a generation of students that has grown up with Google [who] may over-value expediency when locating and selecting appropriate scholarly information” (p. 132). On similar trends, Levy proposes to question the assumption of whether all “young children are inherently ‘native’ users of digital technology” for implications on our future pedagogy within the new textual landscape (p. 152). The case studies and the frameworks built are interesting, but they reveal nothing more than the claim that the essay begins with by Marsh et al. (2005) and Bearne et al. (2007) that “young children are immersed in ‘digital practices’ from an early age and that they often develop skills in handling screen texts even when they are not exposed directly to computers at their own homes” (Levy, 2011, p. 163). The implication is clear: change our schools to accommodate for these new textual practices and help children capitalize on their digital competence and develop “digital wisdom.” But it is a recommendation that has been around for at least a decade, if not more.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The third and concluding section of the book, “Beyond Digital Natives,” is possibly the most promising part of the book. Bennett and Maton seek to look beyond “nuanced versions of the idea” and move the debate on to firmer grounds of how the rise of the digital natives is going to affect the policies around educational technology” (p. 169). They engage with a body of work that is specifically oriented toward building empirical evidence-based frameworks for understanding the potential role of technology in education. With a fine conceptual tool that makes distinctions between access and usage, they systemically dismiss the “academic moral panic” that characterizes conversations around youth-technology-change.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">For Bennett and Maton, the object of inquiry is not the digital native but the body of discourse that surrounds this particular entity—and they make a plea for research rather than imaginings, showing how the influential work in the area has been plagued by unsupported claims, unevidenced observations, and futuristic imaginations, which paint a poetic picture of digital natives but offer very little in terms of furthering the argument. It is also noteworthy that they do not flinch from critiquing the colleagues who also feature in the same book, as an idealizing and homogenizing group that has shown “diversity rather than conformity” (p. 181).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Palfrey and Gasser, whose <em>Born Digital</em> (2008) has been the guide for lay readers to understand the nuances and complexities of the area, in their essay, begin by acknowledging that “digital natives” is an awkward term. However, they argue, it is still a term that resonates deeply with parents and educators, and that this resonance should not be taken lightly by researchers. Their decision was to use this term, albeit with caution and discretion, strategically to refer to a small subset of young people and the gamut of relationships and engagements they have with digital technologies. The suggestion is to use the term and in every usage, look at the unevennesses and awkwardness it creates, thus actually unpacking an otherwise opaque relationship which is reduced to “usage” or “access.” Their concerns are more about the quality of information and access, infrastructure for critical literacy and digital fluency, and making legible these everyday practices to larger implications for a future that they posit is bright and hopeful.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em>Deconstructing Digital Natives</em> is an interesting revisit of a term that has grown in different ways through the first decade of the new millennium. However, the book still remains located in the same geopolitics in which the early discourse of digital natives were grounded—developed, privileged locations where connectivity, affordability, and ubiquitous digital literacy are taken for granted—reminiscent of the frantic cries one hears in piracy markets in Bangkok, “same, same, but different.” The revisiting does not seem to feel the need to explore other contexts. A few essays talk about factoring in local and contextual information in understanding digital natives, but the scholarship reinforces the idea of how technologies shape and are shaped by identities in some parts of the world, and that these identities can be heralded as universally viable, with a little nuancing.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The questions that have emerged in this discourse in the recent years, remain ignored. What does a digital native look like in the Global South? Can we have new concepts and frameworks which emerge from these contexts? Is it possible to produce accounts in languages and ideas that are embedded in everyday practices rather than forcing them to become legible in existing vocabularies? One would hope that the next book that deconstructs digital natives would also deconstruct the prejudices, presumptions, and methodological processes that are embedded in this field.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>References</strong></p>
<ol>
<li>Bearne, E., Clark, C., Johnson, A., Manford, P., Motteram, M., & Wolsencroft, H. (2007). Reading on screen. Leicester: UKLA.</li>
<li>Marsh, J., Brookes, G., Hughes, J., Ritchie, L, Roberts, S., & Wright, K. (2005). <em>Digital beginnings: Young children’s use of popular culture, media and new technologies</em>. Sheffield: Literacy Research Centre, University of Sheffield.</li>
<li>Palfrey, J., & Gasser, U. (2008). <em>Born digital</em>. New York, NY: Basic Books.</li>
<li>Turkle, S. (2011). <em>Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other</em>, NY. New York: Basic Books.</li>
<li>Vaidhyanthan, S. (2011). <em>The Googlization of everything: (And why we should worry)</em>. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.</li>
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<p style="text-align: justify;"><span class="visualHighlight">Nishant Shah is the Director-Research at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society. He is the principal researcher for a Global South inquiry into digital natives and sociopolitical change, and recently edited four-volume book, Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?, which is available as a free download at <a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook" class="external-link">http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook</a>. Correspondence to: Nishant Shah, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India. E-mail: nishant@cis-india.org</span></p>
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<li><span class="visualHighlight">Download the file (originally published by Taylor & Francis) <a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/deconstructing-digital-natives" class="internal-link">here</a> [PDF, 66 Kb]</span></li></ul>
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<li><span class="visualHighlight">Read the original published by Taylor & Francis <a class="external-link" href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17482798.2012.697661">here</a></span></li></ul>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/young-people-technology-new-literacies'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/young-people-technology-new-literacies</a>
</p>
No publishernishantFeaturedResearchers at WorkBook ReviewDigital Natives2015-04-24T11:51:06ZBlog EntryImmigrants not Natives
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/media-coverage/immigrants-not-natives
<b>Sally Wyatt reviews the four-book collective, Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? edited by Nishant Shah & Fieke Jansen.</b>
<p>Review of Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? edited by Nishant Shah & Fieke Jansen, Bangalore: Centre for Internet and Society/The Hague: Hivos Knowledge Programme, 2011:</p>
<p>Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? (2011) is the product of a series of workshops held in 2010-11 in Taiwan, South Africa and Chile. The aim was to bring together a different cohort of ‘digital natives’ than that which had hitherto been assumed in the popular and academic literature, namely white, highly educated, (mostly) male elites largely to be found on and around US university campuses. The workshops brought together 80 people who identified themselves as ‘digital natives’ but with very different backgrounds, and who came from Asia, Africa and Latin America. The four booklets which have been produced on the themes of ‘To Be’, ‘To Think’, ‘To Act’ and ‘To Connect’ provide many fascinating and thought-provoking insights into the possibilities for reflection, action and interaction available to this group.</p>
<p>In my review, I focus on the editorial comments provided by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen in the Preface, the Introduction, and the sidebar text running alongside most of Book One, <em>To Be</em>, in which they provide the context for the workshops and the books, and in which they reflect on the concept of ‘digital native’. Shah and Jansen recognise many of the limits of the concept of ‘digital native’, and reflect upon those limits and possible alternatives. They and the contributors keep the term, while at the same time challenging it, refining it and reclaiming it. It is to this ongoing process of reflection and definition that I would like to contribute, and I do so by thinking about my own position as a user and an analyst of digital technologies and as a Canadian-born child of immigrants. </p>
<p>I was born in 1959 so there is no chance of me being mistaken for a ‘digital native’ (often defined as someone born after 1980). Yet I was programming when I was a student in the late 1970s, and I have lived in a house with a computer in it since 1984, though I didn’t acquire home internet access until 2002, relatively late for a person living in north-western Europe with my income and occupation. One feature of this life, not at all untypical for someone of my age and background, is that I experienced digital technology before it was black-boxed, when to operate a home computer required a certain level of engineering skill, and when the sleekness of today’s devices was still a dream. Maybe I am what the editors refer to (ironically and with affection they claim) as a ‘digital dinosaur’ (p.15). I would never claim to have been part of the cohort who created the internet, though maybe I am part of the group of social scientists who began analysing the social aspects of digital technologies, in both their production and their use, sooner rather than later.<a name="fr1" href="#fn1">[1]</a></p>
<p>I’m also of a generation deeply affected by second-wave feminism. One of the most important books for us was The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, in which she wrote, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ (1949, p.267). This sentence, reproduced on countless posters, coffee mugs and t-shirts, neatly encapsulates the idea that gender is socially constructed, that there is nothing essential about the category of ‘woman’, nor of any other category. I would like to suggest that it also applies to digital natives – they are not born, they are made. Just because processes of socialisation are subtle and powerful, and one no longer has to poke the mother board with a paper clip to make the computer work, it does not mean that digital natives arrive fully formed as such in the world, nor that the identity will remain stable over time for them individually or as a group.</p>
<p>I read these volumes while in Canada in early 2012. I was born and grew up in Canada, though I have lived in Europe for all of my adult life. Canada and other settler societies use ‘native’ differently from Europeans. It was a term often used by colonisers to describe Indigenous communities such as the First Nations people in Canada, Aboriginal people in Australia, or the Māori in New Zealand. ‘Natives’ were not respected by the colonisers, and these groups continue to suffer disadvantage and discrimination. Moreover, the term ‘native’ is not used by Indigenous communities to describe themselves.</p>
<p>And because ‘native’ has different connotations, so does ‘immigrant’. I have lived for the past decade in the Netherlands, where to be an ‘immigrant’ is not comfortable, as attitudes and policies towards immigrants have become harsher, and the official definition of ‘native’ more exclusive. It is different in Canada, where the state of being an immigrant is almost the norm. Most people (except the First Nations people) are immigrants themselves, or have immigrants in their not too distant family histories. Canadians are comfortable with hybrid identities – there are not only French Canadians, but also Chinese Canadians, Greek Canadians and Chilean Canadians. I attended an international sporting event while visiting, and many of the spectators brought two flags with them to wave, depending on who was competing; or they had superimposed the maple leaf (the symbol of Canada that appears in the middle of the national flag) onto the flag of another country. There are many advantages to being an immigrant, apart from a wider choice of sporting heroes. One is that we know that identity is performance. Immigrants are constantly ‘becoming’ - legally, bureaucratically, linguistically and culturally.</p>
<p>Another advantage of being an immigrant comes from understanding the possibilities for re-invention. Many immigrants come for the promise of a better life for themselves and their children. It can be difficult and painful, but also exhilarating to start a new life, without the baggage of the past, whether one’s own youthful indiscretions or the burdens of expectation of the ‘old country’. I wonder whether ‘digital natives’ will ever experience the excitement of a new start. What will happen when they reach middle age, and the digital traces they have been creating since childhood cannot be erased and continue to follow them wherever they go? How will they cope when a younger generation arrives with a newer technology offering other possibilities for social transformation, because we can be certain that there will be newer technologies and that they will be accompanied by promises of social change?</p>
<p>It is too easy to assume that ‘native’ is a superior identity position to ‘immigrant’, or that natives always have advantages compared to immigrants because of their greater familiarity with the norms and codes of a way of life, digital or otherwise. In this volume, the project of reclaiming and expanding the reach of ‘digital native’ suggests that the editors and contributors see it as the preferred identity. Both ‘native’ and ‘immigrant’ are constructed categories, but ‘immigrant’ (from my particular historically located subject position) often feels like a more dynamic and reflexive identity position.</p>
<p>I will conclude by further performing my middle-aged curmudgeonly identity (and it is somewhat frightening how quickly one can slip into this as one passes 50). On many occasions in recent years, I have heard digital natives say – without shame – that they do not read anything that is not available online. Sometimes this is for understandable reasons, such as the cost and scarcity of printed versions, especially in countries where the workshops were held. But sometimes they seem genuinely unaware that many books and sources are not available digitally. One problem with only reading material that is born digital or has been digitised (sometimes badly) is that one becomes desensitised to grammatical niceties. Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen are the editors of these four volumes, and an executive editor is listed in the colophon. I am reluctant to criticise people who might not be native speakers of English, but there is at least one language mistake in almost every paragraph. The paper books of Digital (Alter)Natives with a Cause? are beautifully designed and produced. The production values of this project were high. It is unfortunate that more effort was not expended in language editing. Copy editors are in danger of suffering the same fate as the bison of the Great Plains, but this time not at the hands of settlers but at the hands and keyboards of digital natives.</p>
<hr />
<p>[<a name="fn1" href="#fr1">1</a>].See Wyatt (2008) where I discuss at greater length the relationship between information society debates and feminist analyses of technology, and include elements of my personal relationship to those debates.</p>
<p><strong>References</strong></p>
<ol><li>de Beauvoir, Simone (1949/1989). <em>The Second Sex</em>, trans. H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage Books. </li><li>Wyatt, Sally (2008) ‘Feminism, technology and the information society: Learning from the past, imagining the future’ <em>Information, Communication & Society</em>, 11,1: 111-30.</li></ol>
<p>Sally Wyatt works with the eHumanities Group, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences/Maastricht University.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/media-coverage/immigrants-not-natives'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/media-coverage/immigrants-not-natives</a>
</p>
No publisherSally WyattBook ReviewDigital Natives2012-04-30T10:27:59ZNews ItemAn Experiment in Social Engineering: The Cultural Context of an Avatar
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/media-coverage/an-experiment-in-social-engineering
<b>Pramod K. Nayar reviews Nilofar Shamim Ansher’s essay ‘Engineering a Cyber Twin’ (Digital Alternatives with a Cause? Book One: To Be).</b>
<p>‘Engineering a Cyber Twin’ is an attempt to inventory the ontological features of an avatar. Beginning with the assumption that representation of the self – which implies, at once, recognition of one’s self but also the publicly available narrative of the self – is controlled and controllable, Ansher moves on to representation online. What are the cues that enable viewers of avatars to recognize <em>Ansher’s</em> avatar? What are the parameters of evaluating avatar behaviour, as opposed to, say offline behaviour? Ansher here intervenes with a significant question: why do we always have to ‘read’ the avatar as divided from or compared with the self? Is it an ‘either/or’ equation between self and online avatar?</p>
<p>Examining her cybertwin on MyCybertwin.com, Ansher describes how she designed her avatar. The process included filling out a detailed questionnaire from which the avatar takes its shape, attitudes, values and determines its responses. Essentially, as Ansher discovers, the ‘cyber twin runs on scripts running in my head [sic]’. The personality type to which the twin belongs to must be chosen from a set of six types – which, as Ansher correctly points out, leaves little room for fluidity beyond what the programmer has designed. This also implies that Ansher’s self and the cyber twin function within severe constraints of personality and responses to the personality of the other. When Ansher communicates with the cyber twin the twin picks up keywords from Ansher’s script and conveys them back as its (her?) ‘response’, all suggesting a packaged response. This ensures that there are not too many permutations and combinations or ‘layers’ (Ansher’s term) to the cyber twin’s personality.</p>
<p>Ansher wonders what it would take for the twin to discover motivation, or human ‘sentiments’ such as love or care. Does the avatar really constitute a separate entity, or is it a severely limited extension of what Ansher has chosen from the questionnaire. Ansher has deeper metaphysical questions that connect archives (of information, including the questionnaire) with larger issues of an ethical nature. For example, Ansher notes that she can’t teach her twin ‘good’ and bad’ behaviour from just a questionnaire. Ansher concludes that the twin has not ‘earned the right’ to represent her as her online version.</p>
<p>This is a pithy essay that explores the exhilarations, excitements and tensions of online lives (such avatar lives quietly avoid the domain of messy body functions and fluids). Ansher is spot on in her evaluation of the cyber twin as a limited ‘identity’ where the code – the DNA, or the questionnaire – is itself based on a very short list of normative values and personality ‘types’. She is also correct to argue that the self in real life is not a set of stock responses even if these responses are what have been socialized into us. The self evolves, alters, shifts and these are not always programmable or predictable. Ansher rightly does not go so far as to explore sentience in computers and programming (the stuff of sci-fi), but is concerned with the dynamics of interaction between a sentient creature (her real self) and the avatar.</p>
<p>The ‘engineering’ in Ansher’s title must take on an ironic tone: the avatar is an experiment in social engineering as well where the norms of self-making and meaning-making are cultural and engineering an avatar with stock responses (to which then Ansher responds in the chat) with predilections, preferences and prejudices constitutes a kind of cultural work. When for instance Ansher writes: ‘she [the avatar] doesn’t add layers to her identity so much as reinforce the various traits that go into defining it’ she has isolated the key issue here: the cultural work that produces avatars and online iconography with specific traits are trapped within and limited by the contexts in which real selves grow. Both partake of each other: the cultural work produces the Ansher-self and this Ansher-self produces her avatar. The difference of course is that the Ansher-self is not fixed, is complicated and defiantly unpredictable.</p>
<p>This is an important essay that sidesteps the risks of both hagiography (of digital worlds) and the panic Luddite reactions (not responses, but reactions) to the ‘other’ world. I would have liked a bit more – to be fair, this might be entirely due to the space constraints in the volume – on the eversion of the digital world that we now see: where the digital, the cyber- or the ‘other’ world is not just out there but around us, in us, since we occupy, almost simultaneously, the offline and online today. So, to answer the question raised in the first paragraph, one does not see the cybertwin in terms of an ‘either/or’ with the self. It is simultaneously the radically different other and the extension of the self. The self itself is a series of posturings, role-playings and performances. The online avatar is also one more of these. The presentation of the self in everyday life, to adapt the title of <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Everyday_Life">Goffman’s pioneering work</a>, now includes status messages, scraps, posts, tweets and avatars. The narrative of the self is now inclusive of the sometimes fictional narratives put online by the self. Profile and impression management is also about how one dresses online.</p>
<p>It would also be interesting to examine the various clusters of avatars in such services as MyCybertwin.com or Second Life, to develop a taxonomy of avatars. If, as suggested above, it is cultural work that carries over into designing avatars then such a taxonomy might say something about the societies and structures from which such avatars emerge.</p>
<p>Ansher’s essay draws attention to the complicated ontology of the avatar but also reflects, with considerable intensity, on the dynamic relation of online and offline selves. Thus she eschews a simplistic binary of offline/online, preferring to focus on the domain of interaction between the two ‘personae’ of the same self.</p>
<hr />
<p>Pramod K. Nayar</p>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/pramodnayar.jpg/image_preview" title="Pramod Nayar" height="176" width="235" alt="Pramod Nayar" class="image-inline image-inline" /></p>
<p><strong>Pramod K. Nayar </strong>teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India. His recent publications include Writing Wrongs: The Cultural Construction of Human Rights in India (Routledge 2012), States of Sentiment: Exploring the Cultures of Emotion (Orient BlackSwan 2011), An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures (Wiley-Blackwell 2010), Postcolonialism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum 2010), Packaging Life: Cultures of the Everyday (Sage 2009), Seeing Stars: Spectacle, Society and Celebrity Culture (Sage 2009) among others. His forthcoming books include Digital Cool: Life in the Age of New Media (Orient BlackSwan) and Colonial Voices: The Discourses of Empire (Wiley-Blackwell).</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/media-coverage/an-experiment-in-social-engineering'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/media-coverage/an-experiment-in-social-engineering</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaBook ReviewDigital Natives2012-03-06T06:03:19ZNews ItemDigital (Alter)Natives with a Cause? — Book Review by Maarten van den Berg
https://cis-india.org/book-review-digital-alternatives
<b>‘Digital (Alter)Natives with a cause?’ is a collection of four books with essays published by the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India, and the Dutch NGO Hivos. The books come in a beautifully designed cassette and are accompanied by a funky yellow package in the shape of a floppy disk containing the booklet ‘D:coding Digital Natives’, a corresponding DVD, and a pack of postcards portraying the evolution of writing - in the sentence ‘I love you’, written with a goose feather in 1734, to the character set ‘i<3u’ entered on a mobile device in 2011.</b>
<h3>Digital Natives</h3>
<p>The publication is the outcome of a programme initiated by the two
organizations to investigate the potentials for social change and
political participation in emerging societies through the use of
internet and communication technologies (ICTs). The programme is
particularly interested in the strategic use of ICTs among young people,
those who are born and have grown up with ‘things digital’ – hence, the
‘digital natives’, a term coined by Marc Prensky in 2001.</p>
<p>But in the preface of the collection and the introduction to the
first book, entitled ‘To Be’, the editors Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen
are quick to stress that by naming digital natives, they do not want to
exclude any position whether defined by age, gender, class, language or
location. Still, ‘we continue with the name’, they say, ‘because we
believe that replacing this name with another is only going to be an
epistemic change which tries to disown the earlier legacies and baggage
that the name carries’. I am not quite sure what that means. I take it
they just like the hashtag #DigitalNatives – and I can’t blame them.</p>
<h3>Testimonies</h3>
<p>So who are these digital natives or how have they become? The booklet
‘D:coding Digital Natives’ portrays some of them. For instance, there
is Frank Odaongkara from Uganda. He says that already in primary school
he had the feeling that computers would change his life. Now Facebook is
his homepage, and he has 1000 ebooks on his laptop, of which he’s read
350 already. Or there is Leandra Flor from the Philippines who says she
became more dynamic and in touch with her surroundings because of the
‘wonders of technology in communication’. She has built her social life
around it.</p>
<p>What emerges from these testimonies, what many of the digital natives
share is the sense of empowerment. They feel empowered by ICTs to
connect to others, to learn something, to engage with the world and
build social lives. Contrary perhaps to the aspirations of the editors, I
do find that the digital natives in emerging societies portrayed in the
publication tend to come from relatively well-to-do families. The
digital divide is still very real, when it comes to access to ICTs and
their life-changing potentials.</p>
<h3>Personal > political</h3>
<p>That digital natives feel empowered by ICTs to build a social life
does of course not necessarily entail that they bring about social
change or pursue political goals. But one thing can lead to the other,
even accidentally. Take the story of Manal Hassan, an Egyptian woman
who found herself trapped in Saudi Arabia when her family went to live
there. She started a blog to write about her problem and got in contact
with other Egyptian bloggers and digital activists. Women rights
organizations adopted her cause, a lawyer took up her case, and she made
news in the mainstream media. She had become a political actor.</p>
<p>There are more such stories in the publication. In the digital age,
it seems, social change has gone viral. Digital natives can become
political actors by sheer coincidence. I believe there is an important
lesson to learn from that for sociologists and political scientists. We
have to come to terms with the serendipity of collective action.</p>
<h3>Digital methodology</h3>
<p>For social scientists, there is more to be learned from the
publication. In the introduction to the essays brought together in the
chapter ‘To Think’ the editors pose that the rise and spread of digital
and online technologies elicit new methods of understanding and
research. And they are quite right. In the essay ‘Digital methods to
study digital natives with a cause’, Esther Weltevrede uses Twitter as a
platform to study digital natives and their practices. And because the
retweet is a practice adopted by digital natives to forward, or give
voice to a message, she proposes that for the researcher the retweet
becomes a way to quantify those messages that have ‘pass-along value’. </p>
<h3>Mob rule 2.0</h3>
<p>As many of the authors are themselves digital natives and activists
of sorts, most of them cannot hide their excitement about the
opportunities that ICTs afford. But there is some room for skepticism
too. Thus, essayist Yi Ping Zou rightly observes that ‘the newly
imagined communities that we call digital natives […] may not be all
progressive, liberal and striving to make a change for the better’. In
her contribution she warns us for ‘mob rule 2.0’ as the very digital
technologies that allow us ‘to create processes of change for a just and
equitable world’ are also technologies that ‘enable massively
regressive and vigilante acts that exercise a mob-based notion of
justice’.</p>
<h3>That vision thing</h3>
<p>And as is the case with any form of collective action, digitally
mediated or not, there is the question of purpose. In an essay that
compares the youth-led ‘revolution’ of 1968 and the Arab Spring of 2011,
David Sasaki observes that both are essentially anti-establishment
movements and that, so far, the latter has prioritized the removal of
the current political class without offering a concrete vision of what
ought to come next. As far as this author is concerned, the digital
natives have yet to develop a vision of their own future – and the
future of their governments.</p>
<p>I believe that we should not expect from today’s youth what
yesterday’s young ones did not accomplish. Let us consider the digital
natives and the technologies they employ for what they do, not for what
they ought to be doing. And after reading some of the testimonies of
digital natives in this publication, I cannot but conclude – as Eddie
Avila does in the last book – that what brings them together is “a
vision that the everyday technologies in their lives can help them make
changes in their immediate environments”. Such is not a vision about
politics writ large. It is about change at the personal level, the
ability to connect and engage with others, and, from there, the
possibility to act collectively – and give it a larger direction.</p>
<p><em>'Digital (Alter)Natives with a cause?', Nishant Shah and Fieke
Jansen (eds), is available for download in four parts at the website of
the Hivos Knowledge Programme.</em></p>
<p>The review by Maarten van den Berg was published in "The Broker" on September 19, 2011. Please click <a class="external-link" href="http://www.thebrokeronline.eu/Articles/Digital-Alter-Natives">here</a> to read the original review.</p>
<h3>About the author</h3>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/Maarten.jpg/image_preview" alt="Maarten" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Maarten" /></td>
<td>
<p>A political scientist by training (University of Amsterdam, York
University, Canada), Maarten van den Berg is senior editor of The
Broker,an independent magazine on globalization and development. Before
he joined The Broker in 2011, Maarten worked as a communication and
knowledgement professional for a variety of international organizations,
and still has his own consultancy, RISQ. After work, Maarten loves to
cook and shares in the care of his son Titus. </p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p> Photo credit main picture: Postcard 'Digital Natives' designed by Jonathan Remulla.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/book-review-digital-alternatives'>https://cis-india.org/book-review-digital-alternatives</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaWeb PoliticsResearchers at WorkBook ReviewDigital Natives2015-05-15T11:30:47ZNews Item