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Political is as Political does
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/political
<b>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.</b>
<p> <strong>The researcher in his heaven, all well with the world</strong></p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> <strong>Questioning the Question</strong></p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> 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:</p>
<p> <em><strong>Political as dialogue</strong></em></p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> <em><strong>Political as concern</strong></em></p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> <em><strong>Political as change</strong></em></p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> 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?</p>
<p> <em><strong>Political as Freedom</strong></em></p>
<p> 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?</p>
<p> <a href="http://northeastwestsouth.net/brief-treatise-despair-meaning-or-pointlessness-everything#comment-2131"><em><strong>Political as Reticence</strong></em></a></p>
<p> 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?</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p> <strong>The Beginning of a Start; Perhaps also the other way round</strong></p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/political'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/political</a>
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No publishernishantDigital ActivismDigital NativesPoliticalYouthFeaturedCyberculturesDigital subjectivitiesWorkshop2011-08-04T10:30:51ZBlog Entry