Centre for Internet and Society

Digital Native: Delete Facebook?

nishant — 2018-05-06T03:08:25Z

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

The article was published in Indian Express on April 8, 2018.

One fine day, we all woke up and were told that Facebook sold our data to Cambridge Analytica and then they made dastardly profiles of us to target us with advertisement and political propaganda, so, we made a beeline for #DeleteFacebook. The most surprising part about the expose is how much of a non-event it is. We have been warned, at least since the Edward Snowden revelations, if not earlier, that our data is the new oil, coal and gold. It is being used as a resource, it is being mined from our everyday digital transactions, and it is precious because it can result in a massive social engineering without our consent or knowledge. Ever since Facebook started expanding its domain from being a friends-poke-friends-with-livestock website, we have been warned that the ambition of Facebook was never to connect you with your friends but to be your friend.

Time and again, we have been told that the sapient Facebook algorithm remembers everything you say and do, anticipates all your future needs, and listens to the most banal litany of your life. More than your mom, your partner or your shrink, it’s the Facebook algorithm which is interested in all your quotidian uselessness. It is not the stranger who accesses your post that should worry you. The biggest perpetrator of privacy violations on Facebook is Facebook itself. There is good reason why a company that offers its prime products for free is valuated as one of the richest corporations in the world. The product of Facebook – it has always been known – is us.

Why, then, are we suddenly taken aback at the fact that Facebook sold us? And while we are sharing our thoughts (ironically on Facebook) about deleting our profiles, the question that remains is this: How much of your digital life are you willing to erase? Because, and I am sorry if this pricks your filter bubble, Facebook’s problem is not really a Facebook problem. It is almost the entire World Wide Web, where we lost the battle for data ownership and platform openness more than two decades ago. Name one privately owned free service that you use on the internet and I will show you the section in its “terms and services” where you have surrendered your data. In fact, you can’t even find government services, tied up with their private partners, where your data is safe and stored in privacy vaults where it won’t be abused.

It is time to realise that the popular ’90s meme “All your base are belong to us” is the lived reality of our digital lives. As we forego ownership for convenience, as our governments sold our sovereignty for profits, and as digital corporations became behemoths that now have the capacity to challenge and write our constitutional and fundamental rights, we are waking up to a battle that has already been fought and resolved. A large part of our physical hardware to access the internet is privately owned. This means that almost all our PCs, tablets, phones, servers are owned and open to exploitation by private companies. Every time your phone does an automatic update or your PC goes into house-cleaning mode, you have to realise that you are being stored, somewhere in the cloud in ways that you cannot imagine.

It is tiring to hear this alarm and panic around Facebook’s data trading. Not only is it legal, it is something that has been happening for a while, most of us have been aware of it, and we have resolutely ignored it because, you know, cute cats. If somebody tells you that they are against privately owned physical property and are going to start a revolution to take away all private property and make it equally shared with the public, you would laugh at them because they are arriving at the battle scene after the war is over. This digital wokeness trend to #DeleteFacebook is the digital equivalent of that moment. If you want to fight, fight the governments and nations who can still protect us. Participate in conversations around Internet governance. Take responsibility to educate yourself about the politics of how the digital world operates. But stop trying to feel virtuous because you pulled out of a social media network, pretending that that is the end of the problem.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-april-8-2018-digital-native-delete-facebook

Digital native: Control A, Backspace

nishant — 2016-06-05T02:25:45Z

The rewriting of textbooks should not be compared to the collaborations on Wikipedia, which only goes by evidence.

The article was published in Indian Express on June 5, 2016.

I remember the first time I made an edit on Wikipedia — it was almost 10 years ago, and it was a heady feeling, to realise that here is a global encyclopaedia being written, and that I could be a part of it. It felt strange, because I was brought up to believe that authors are special people with specialised knowledge, which can only be validated from special institutions, and that authorship required years of practice and perseverance.

However, a historic experiment by Nature magazine showed, that despite the average age of the then Wikipedia editor as somewhere in the late teens, articles in Wikipedia were not any more prone to error than in other established, institutionalised fountains of knowledge like the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In fact, not only were the non-specialised editors of Wikipedia spot on with their knowledge outputs, but that because of its iterative nature, errors, once spotted on Wikipedia could be immediately corrected, thus leading to a more robust source of knowledge.

Two key principles helped Wikipedia establish this process of reliable and resilient knowledge systems — neutrality of viewpoint, and evidence-based knowledge. In the largely free and open space of Wikipedia editing, the one thing that remained constant is neutrality. Editors, despite their own biases, locations, contexts, experiences or embodied knowledges, could not introduce their opinions or original research into the Wikipedia articles. This necessarily meant that every truth and knowledge claim made in a Wikipedia article needs to be verified through a source. This source could come from different spaces and different formats, but it serves as objective evidence for the information being provided there. In instances — and there are thousands of them, if not more — where two editors disagreed on how to interpret an event, or how to describe a person or a thing, the edit-war was fuelled not by the I-said-You-said never-ending rhetoric, but by relying on the soundness of research conducted by external sources.

For some years now, Wikipedia has become the de facto global reference system, which still relies on volunteers and non-specialised editors to contribute to complex, complicated and very specialised domains of human knowledge production. Even when the editors are experts or scholars, their contribution has value and merit, only when it is supported by externally verifiable source that supports their view points.

Wikipedia has become one of the foundational models of the information web, that makes it clear that knowledge can be freely produced, consumed and circulated, and more importantly, it can be negotiated and contested, thereby making our scientific research practices relevant and pertinent beyond the hallowed and often closed halls of the university. Wikipedia became a prime example of how information can be revised, changed, mutated, updated, upcycled, and subjected to deep scrutiny as long as it is informed by an alignment towards neutrality and supported by evidence produced through research.

I invoke these principles that have fostered one of the most magnificent pieces of collaborative human effort because it directly puts into contrast the revisionist, biased, authoritative and closed practices by which the Indian educational councils seem to be editing textbooks. The removal of the names of historical figures, the rewriting of history to reflect a biased, narrow and unsubstantiated narrative, the erasure of alternative histories and voices of protest and dissent, and the false planting of information which is grounded in the school of “People say” and the university of “I have heard” is an alarming development. Many people unfortunately think of this political revisionism as mimicking the wisdom of the crowds recounting and contestation of information on spaces like Wikipedia.

It is important to note that these attempts at revising known facts and of producing religious histories of exclusion and violence are not the digital mode of information upcycling. These revisions are firmly rooted in a political agenda that seeks to sanctify the discriminatory violences of our neo-authoritarian governments. They remain challenged by the scholars in the field who have enough evidence — of archives, of tracts, of data, and of information — that show that this information is false. They are entrenched in the politics of power that insist that this is the only true account of things, excluding public discourse, and performing acts of censorship that discourage all access to scientific learning.

The proponents who want to Make in India, cannot limit their rhetoric only to economic production, but have to extend collaborative and connected making to knowledge and information production. And this entails the unmaking of these authoritarian and fascist attempts at justifying rumours as information, hate speech as free speech, and revisions as conversations.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/indian-express-june-5-2016-nishant-shah-digital-native-control-a-backspace

Digital Native: Cause an Effect

nishant — 2018-06-26T15:21:01Z

Aadhaar is a self-contained safe system, its interaction with other data and information systems is also equally safe and benign.

The article was published in the Indian Express on June 17, 2018.

Statistically, it has been proven, that the consumption of ice cream in the country increases significantly in the summer months. In the same months, the number of housebreak incidents also increase. It might be possible, though ridiculous, to now make an argument that eating ice cream leads to increased frequencies of housebreakings, and, hence, sale and consumption of ice cream should be regulated more rigorously. The humour in this situation arises out of the fact that we know, at a very human level, that correlation is not the same as causation.

We know that just because two things happen in temporal or spatial proximity with each other doesn’t necessarily mean they are connected or responsible in a chain of events. This is because human communication is designed to make a distinction between cause-and-effect relationship and happened-together relationship between two sets of information.

However, when it comes to computation, things turn slightly different. Within the database logics of computation, two sets of data, occurring in the same instance, are subjected to a simple scrutiny: Either one of them is linked with the other, or, one of the two is noise, and, hence, needs to be removed from the system. Computation systems are foundationally anchored on logic. Within logical systems, all the events and elements described in the system are interlinked and have a causal relationship with each other. Computational learning systems, thus, do not have the capacity to make a distinction between causal and correlative phenomena.

This is why computation systems of data mining and profiling are so much more efficient than human cognition. Not only are these systems able to compute a huge range of data, but they are also able to make unprecedented, unforeseen, unexpected, and often unimagined connections between seemingly disparate and separate information streams. I present to you this simplified notion of computer logic because it is at the heart of the biometric identity-based debates around Aadhaar right now. Recently, Ajay Bhushan Pandey, CEO, UIDAI, wrote an opinion piece that insisted that the data collective mechanisms of Aadhaar are not only safe but also benign. His opinion is backed by Bill Gates, who also famously suggested that “Aadhaar in itself” is not dangerous.

And, in many ways, Gates is right, even if Pandey’s willful mischaracterisation of Gates’s statement is not. For Gates, a computer scientist looking at the closed architecture of the Aadhaar system, it might appear, that in as much as any digital system could be safe, Aadhaar is indeed safe. In essence, Gates’s description was, that as a logical system of computational architecture, Aadhaar is safe, and the data within it, in their correlation with each other, does not form any sinister networks that we need to worry about.

However, Pandey takes this “safe in itself” argument to extend it to the applications and implementations of Aadhaar. He argues that because Aadhaar is a self-contained safe system, its interaction with other data and information systems is also equally safe and benign. In this, Pandey, either out of ignorance or willful mischaracterisation, confuses correlation with causality. He refuses to admit that Aadhaar and the biometrics within that are the central focal point around which a variety of data transactions happen which produce causal links between disconnected subjects.

Thus, the presence of a digital biometric data set might not in itself be a problem, but when it became the central verification system that connects your cellphone with your geolocation data, your presence and movement with your bank account and your income tax returns, your food and lifestyle consumption with your medical records, it starts a causal link between information which was hitherto unconnected, and, hence, considered trivial.

The alarm that the critics of Aadhaar have been raising is not about whether the data on Aadhaar is safe or not, but, how, in the hands of unregulated authorities, the correlations that Aadhaar generates and translates into causal profiles have dire consequences on the privacy and liberty of the individuals who carry the trace of Aadhaar in all facets of life. Pandey and his team of governors need to explain not the safety of Aadhaar but what happens when the verification information of Aadhaar is exploited to create non-human correlations of human lives, informing policy, penalisation and pathologisation through these processes.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-june-17-2018-digital-native-cause-an-effect

Digital native: Back at it Again

nishant — 2017-02-02T15:04:46Z

The Indian digital landscape has put us in a loop of hashtags and outrage, a space where we have mastered the art of shame.

The article was published in the Indian Express on January 22, 2017.

Writing a regular column is daunting. One of the things that I constantly have to check is that I am not repeating myself. At the same time, in the digital age where all memory has become storage, and all that is stored is quickly forgotten, I also hope that what I write has life beyond the first few clicks, the Sunday morning coffee, the shares and likes that mark the beginning of the end of digital information.

However, as I write the column this new year, I find myself in a strange situation where I am repeating what I have done the last three years at the beginning of each new year, and where I am desperately wishing that things I had last written became dated. Three years ago, while commenting on the Indian digital landscape, I had written about the rage, the fury, and the almost deafening battle cry that had captured the national imagination, when, at the turn of the year, a young woman we named Nirbhaya lost her life to violent sexual abuse on a moving bus in Delhi. #NeverAgain, we tweeted. #AlwaysRemember, we chanted. We called her #OurBraveheart and, in that moment of national outcry and dialogue about gender and sexual abuse in our public spaces, it seemed as if the digital landscape was reflecting a pivotal change in the fabric of the country.

The year after that, as we struggled to find ways in which law can keep us safe, the apex court in India re-criminalised homosexuality, reverting the judgment of the Delhi High Court which had given life and dignity to same sex and queer couples. The legal system proved that it is not only blind but also susceptible to mass populism that denies the rights to consenting adults to live their lives in dignity. That was the year when we hashtagged our solidarity with #NoGoingBack, making it trend so that umpteen number of people came out in support of homosexuality in the country. Support to the queer community came from unexpected quarters, like the generally reticent Bollywood celebrities who supported #Scrap377, and even religious and political representatives who recognise that the continued abuse of queer communities is a violation of our constitutional rights.

While the struggles for gender and sexual equality continue in the country, and tireless activists and civil society advocates persist in their demands of justice and protection, here we are, waking up to yet another year of public shame and private grief, as reports came of the aggressive sexual abuse that women had to endure on the streets of Bangalore. The incident unfolded with all the trappings of victim blaming, slut shaming, and a sentence that should never be allowed — “She was asking for it.” On the digital social web, in the meantime, some sanctimonious men, indignant at the thought of being accused of patriarchal silence and misogynist privilege, decided to take attention away from the victims and decided to steal the spotlight with a hashtag that says #NotAllMen. These tweeters, who have no problem in enjoying the benefits of an abusive sexist social order — they might not actively go out to inflict gendered violence, but they are complicit in enjoying the privileges of that system — had a problem with taking responsibility for that system. They would not be shamed. Not even when an overwhelming number of women wrote back with #YesAllWomen, would they concede their grounds.

As it occurs so often on the Interwebz, the conversation that demanded both a private reflection and a public dialogue, devolved into personal name calling and collective anger deflected from the problem at hand. In the midst of the sensationalism that passes off as discussion in populist media channels, I want to think of something else. If all these voices in our public discourse were to be heard, it would feel like gendered and sexual safety are national preoccupations and bipartisan concerns. The customised expressions of our personalised media abound with anger, shame, critique, and analyses of why our country is increasingly becoming unsafe for certain bodies to walk through it. Social media accounts are producing a spectacle of concern for safety so effectively that it would seem these questions will be resolved immediately.

And yet, even as I look at my biographical history of writing this column, I realised that I have revisited these discussions over and over again. This is a debate that now occurs regularly, each time, giving us the chance to identify a problem, go online and make a lot of noise about it, and then settle down, with a smug smile on our faces of having done our public performance, without ever translating it into action. On the digital web, we seem to have mastered the art of shame without guilt. We continue to hashtag, like, tweet, share, and click our ways, using prepackaged formulae of expression without translating it into personal reflection or collective action. And the digital seems to be enabling this where having an opinion seems to matter more than actual transformation, and spectacles of shame seem to acquit us of the responsibility of action.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-january-22-2017-digital-native-back-at-it-again

Digital native: Are You Still Having Fun?

nishant — 2017-05-05T01:37:40Z

Before you accept a fun app into your digital ecosystem, prepare yourself for the data you will be giving away.

Nishant Shah is a professor of new media and the co-founder of The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore. The article was published in the Indian Express on April 17, 2017.

So, I hope, by now, you have figured out who your celebrity lookalike is. Mine, for her sins, is Emma Watson. Now, as you scratch your heads and wonder how a “facial recognition algorithm’”decided that my mug matches with the stunning actor who shall always remain imprinted as Hermione Granger to my Harry Potter- fan-boy self, it is worth wondering how on earth I know this.

If you have been on Facebook the last week or two, you will have noticed that almost all of your friends, as if drawn in a zombie apocalypse, taking this quiz and posting their results. It was a simple enough app — you upload a picture, and then using advanced computer morphing, it shows how your face transitions from yours to the stunning celebrities that we love and worship.

Nothing better on a Monday morning to know that the barely human face you are wearing — a mixture of grump and where-is-my-coffee — actually looks like the photoshopped avatar of a celeb. In many ways, this was a truly progressive app because it refused to look at gender, race, ethnicity, age or any of the other criteria of biometric representation and no matter what super-grouch face you presented, it always matched you with the celebrity you always secretly wanted to look like anyway.

Now, listen! I know that the earnest value of social media is essentially in apps like these. The point of these apps, which are largely just a continuation of the old trash magazine quizzes about self-determination and expression, is that they continue to enthrall, enchant and make our everyday click-and-scroll lives slightly more memorable and enjoyable. However, unlike those old Cosmo and Vogue quizzes which you secretly took to see if you are more a Miranda or a Carrie (I know that is an old reference, but hey, this is an old quiz!), these apps have a more sinister dimension.

When you clicked on that small app, because your friend did so, you did not count on three things. One, that as you nonchalantly clicked on ‘OK’ giving permission to this app to your Facebook profile, you also gave it consent to access your almost entire social media profile. Most of these apps are able to now look at your friends list, your contact list, your messaging history, your photo-gallery, and can access your microphone and camera, to give an answer that is so fake, it can easily masquerade as an elected official.

Second, that you might have taken the test for a moment of childish fantasy and then decided to move on with your life. Except that even if you did not share that post, the results were saved because you gave that app consent to use your uploaded picture in its own advertisement and also gave it authority to show your friends that you were stupid enough to take this test. This also includes your boss on Facebook, who might see what you were doing at 2.44 that afternoon when you were sitting in a serious meeting that was supposed to engulf you. Just like your friend might not have actively shared the first click-bait post but the app posted on their behalf.

And third, you gave this app the permission to not only harvest your Facebook profile for data that it is going to sell to third-party consumers who are curious to know about your location, age, eating habits, cultural preferences, friendship networks, and mood representations so that they can customise advertisements to sell you things that you didn’t know you wanted. In the world of Big Data, a single click-based consent can be the beginning of an avalanche of data mining, where, before you know it, all your correlated data across all your apps – sometimes sensitive data that might even betray your financial and physical safety — can easily be harvested, and all because you wanted to check out a fun app.

Apps pretend to be benign and often are so. However, when you accept an app into your digital ecosystem, it is sometimes useful to be slightly more cautious of what the added value of the app is. And before you say yes, it might also be good to just take a little more caution about what permissions you are granting it, and whether you really want to give away that data for a moment of fun. Facebook and other social media networks will continue to warn you about keeping your information private and safe from strangers. However, they will refuse to remind you that when you are online, your private data is more likely to be harmfully abused and used by apps with celebrity pictures and dancing babies, rather than the friend from school who has already probably put you into a block list.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-april-17-2017-digital-native-are-you-still-having-fun

Digital Native: AI Manifesto

nishant — 2018-03-17T11:02:55Z

Our intention and government action will determine our relationship with AI.

The article was published in the Indian Express on February 25, 2018.

There was a time when artificial intelligence was a thing of the future. We had fantasy-filled projections of AI that would assist, serve, augment, and amplify human actions at an unprecedented scale and speed. We dreamt of autonomous machines performing tasks to serve human intention and simplify our lives. The science-fiction future that our past once imagined has become the present that we live in. It is true that we haven’t quite cracked the code on organising equitable and fair societies because of the rise of the machines — quite the contrary — but we have definitely become accustomed to living with AI.

Last week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi opened a new research institute for the development of artificial intelligence in Kalina, Maharashtra. In his opening speech, keeping in tune with the ‘Make in India’ campaign that we have been building Digital India dreams on, Modi declared that AI and automation are the new leaps of technology that will transform human race, and that it is important for India to invest in these technologies. In a speech that was largely a political on-brand messaging of local jobs and more investment in digitisation, there was one statement that stood out for me: “It is our intention that will determine outcomes of AI”, said Modi, as he argued for an AI that will help reconcile and diminish the differences in our societies.

This centring of human intention as critical to the future of artificial intelligence has been missing in too many techno-centric views, which often think of AI as purely a technological evolution. The past decade has shown us enough examples that AI is anything but. Image recognition AI applications have shown their racial biases and tagged non-white faces as animals; the same application has also been used to silence protestors by identifying them in crowds and reporting them to authoritarian governments.

Predictive AI smart city applications have shown a preference towards communities in power, and have affected property rates based on segregation and zoning. Companion AI like Siri and Alexa still struggle to interact with non-standard accents, while companion smart devices like refrigerators and TVs have become gateways for hacking and infecting networks with viruses. AI has triggered seismic collapses in the stock market and rendered more volatile the valuations of new cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Despite the proof that AI is not only informed but also constrained by human expression, desire, and intention, the Elon Muskian techno-futurism holds sway.

Modi’s lucid recognition of AI as led by human interventions is a welcome break from the otherwise breathless investments that nations, including India, have been making in the development of AI neural learning networks and algorithms. I was surprised that the Prime Minister struck this note of caution and gave us the direction that all AI cannot be good unto itself. We will need to find an ethical code that determines AI for social good, and that the measure of the AI will be in its service of the human intention.

While I applaud this critical stance, I still wonder, then, why there have been no attempts to “walk this talk”. Across the world, as countries invest in AI development, many of them have simultaneously developed ministries, committees, and communities to examine, question and bring out a manifesto for what artificial intelligence can and cannot do. In Japan, a ministry works on developing a framework of artificial intelligence for social good. In China, there are ongoing conversations about ethical conduct of AI. In Singapore, AI standards include ethical checks and balances that ensure that it cannot be used for rogue purposes. In India, however, when it comes to these critical public conversations, there has been a vacuum. Even in systems like Aadhaar, which have now continually been critiqued for being invasive, there is very little attention paid to conditions of privacy, safety, and social good.

I know that we are still in the emergent phase of AI, and even more nascent in India. However, I take hope in Modi’s words that, for once, the government will understand ethics, social justice interventions and designs to be as critical to AI development as innovation and technology hubs; and, hopefully, there will be resources and thought invested in building a manifesto for living with AI.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-february-25-2018-digital-native-ai-manifesto

Digital Native: A new road to justice

nishant — 2018-03-25T03:44:34Z

Making the List takes courage and strength. It involves the formation of a new collective of care.

The article was published in the Indian Express on March 25, 2018.

I want to tell you today about an incredible and inspiring young woman — let us call her Hope, because that is the pseudonym she uses online, in order to talk about the current state of digital activism in the face of #MeToo movements and #List politics.

I first met Hope in South Africa. She joined a series of workshops we were conducting on digital natives around online activism, and she was 19 at the time. In one of the conversations, she recounted the story that pushed her into activism. It was the gruesome story of a fellow student in school, who was raped and sexually abused by four other male students in the school. The men used their cellphones to record this act on school campus. The young survivor, traumatised by the incident, did not want to make the names of the perpetrators public or confront them by identifying them. The videos that emerged did not show the faces of the four young men. And the authorities, in the school, and in regulation, kept silent in the face of viral outrage online.

When the people responsible for justice abdicated their responsibilities, young people, including students in the school, decided to take matters in their own hands. They conducted digital forensic investigations on the videos to trace them back to the devices and identities. They crowdsourced identification of the four young men involved by analysing voices, marks, mannerisms, and bodies. The four men were publicly named in an online list. Hope was a part of this group. She told us that it took the courage and collective care of more than 10,000 people to finally bring these abusers to public light and, eventually, to justice. She also told us that when her core group started these activities of naming, they were threatened, bullied, coerced and persecuted by others defending the men. Every time they tried to bring the matter to light, they were blocked, harassed and attacked.

To name names, and to ask that they be brought to justice, seemed like an impossible thing. Any attempt at translating the shadow knowledge of whisper groups from human memory to digital storage met with resistance. Even when the case went to court, the young women who mobilised the organisation of this entire online movement were questioned and chastised for being vigilantes. Hope and her community were first questioned about their integrity, and later dismissed as clicktivists who don’t do any real work. The questioning came from authorities who felt pressured into taking up something that they would rather remain silent about. The dismissal came from traditional civil society organisations that remained excluded from this process and refused to accept the validity and the critical role that these young people play in transforming how we live.

That was in 2009. It is disheartening and alarming that these approaches that seek to silence young people who want change persist in 2018. Last year, we saw the emergence of the list in the wake of the global #metoo context. Even when the first names were made public, the authorities tried to dismiss it because it had no credibility, and there were traditional groups that sought to silence it because it did not follow their established processes of intervention making in the field of sexual abuse. There are many troubles with the list — it sometimes flattens out the entire landscape of abuse and does not qualify the intensities that mark abuse in all its variety. It doesn’t allow us to understand that abuse is a genre and there are multiple forms of it which do not only take the form of physical sexual violence. It does not allow for negotiation and commits to memory the names which might be, perhaps, undeserving of the negative attention.

And yet, we need to recognise, that the very act of making the list is one of courage and strength. It is not an individual attempt but the formation of a new collective of care. And just like other forms of digital organisation and activism, it has invisible labour, often performed by women, that remains unacknowledged. To dismiss the listmakers as finger-tip activists is to betray the ignorance and insecurity that one faces when confronted with new modes of direct action, informal collectives that digital networks produce. The list will continue to be a problem, and it will only do what lists can do — bring to light things that are being erased or forgotten. But to deny legitimacy or credibility to the list-making; and, hence, to negate the physical and affective labour behind such lists that can make people accountable — if not offer total justice — is a kind of abuse of power that needs to be questioned and called out.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-march-25-2018-digital-native-a-new-road-to-justice

Digital Native: #MemeToo

nishant — 2018-10-02T06:20:15Z

An old meme shows the need for emotional literacy in our digitally saturated age. Memes, like regrettable exes, have the habit of resurfacing at regular periods.

The article was published in Indian Express on September 9, 2018.

Memes, like regrettable exes, have the habit of resurfacing at regular periods. This week saw the return of the “Qajar Princess” meme across social media and institutional news media outlets as well. For those late to the viral party, Princess Qajar first made its appearance towards the end of 2017, when the world was riding high on its pop-feminist assertions and the revelations of the #MeToo movements — a photograph of a person dressed in a gown with dark long hair, thick eyebrows and a moustache, as she gets her portrait shot. The caption identified this person as Princess Qajar who was a “symbol of beauty in Persia” (now Iran), and also stated how “13 young men killed themselves” because she rejected their advances.

Everything about the meme was click-bait worthy — from the defiance of feminine standards to the possibility of a woman scripting her own narrative of beauty and empowerment. It fed perfectly into our female emancipation narratives.

There was only one problem with this meme — it was completely made up. There was quick debunking of all its claims. Excellent websites like Abitofhistory and many investigators on Reddit showed that everything about the meme was a fabrication. While it did seem to respond to the political zeitgeist and celebrate women’s bodies and desire — also giving us a non-Western narrative of beauty — it was all just #FakeNews. The meme had more or less died its timely death by the time 2018 rolled in, but, surprisingly, it has come back again on Instagram and Facebook news where equal parts admiration and ridicule are expressed at the cost of the person in that image.

The meme does not have any immediate problematic actions associated with it, though it carries both the oriental prejudices of framing the Persian region as “freaky”, and the misogynist framing of a woman’s body as something that is available for shameless analysing and commenting. This obvious piece of disinformation does belie the volatile nature of news and information circulation that we live in, in the age of information overload. I was in Jakarta in late August, sitting with 30 news media professionals, information activists, and policy actors from Asia, where we were discussing the surfeit of such disinformation, and our apparent incapacity to engage with it.

As we went through various workshops and talks curated by the Digital Asia Hub, one thing was increasingly becoming clear. People do not have a rational relationship with information. In fact, historically, the regulation of news media has been focused on how to create a rational, evidence-based narrative so that information consumers can be trained into developing a rational relationship with the information that comes to them. However, as information production and consumption patterns change, with the proliferation of new info sources and authorship, these old regulations are collapsing. We have tried very hard, even in artistic platforms like cinema, to distinguish between factual information and emotional information.

Especially in countries like India, where such disinformation has resulted in vigilante justice and lynch-mob violence, the question of how we manage the emotional tenor of our information consumption is critical. Information management giants like Facebook and its messaging service WhatsApp have come under severe scrutiny because they have become platforms of unfettered disinformation. Especially with newly-literate digital users engaging with this information on sites which are not informational but social, the viral trigger and emotional responses has been quick and uncontrolled. The tech companies have started introducing a variety of solutions — limiting the number of people a message can be forwarded to, establishing filters that mark messages as possibly suspicious, restricting the powers of group broadcasting to moderators and introducing forward marks to signal authorship.

These technical solutions are only going so far in tackling the fundamental question of emotional information. Technical solutions fall back on the management of factual information. It can provide a series of safeguards that could insert a pause between the first delivery and immediate action, but this presumes that the person receiving and sharing the information is interested in that pause. What we need, and haven’t paid enough attention to, is how we can train people into developing an emotional literacy for the age of information overload. While the technology development has to continue its filtering and managing, what we perhaps need is a people’s movement that focuses on how to give voice to and recognise the emotional expression and manipulation that these new information regimes are ushering in.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-september-9-2018-digital-native-meme-too

Digital Native

nishant — 2015-04-17T10:40:02Z

The end of the year is supposed to be a happy, feel-good space for families, friends, societies and communities to come together and count our blessings. It is the time to look at things that have gone by and look forward to what the New Year will bring.

The article was originally published in the Indian Express on December 22, 2013.

And yet, when I started writing this piece, my horizons seemed to be eclipsed by the amount of violence we have witnessed in the last year, and the inability of our governance systems to deal with them.

Around this time last year, the nation had woken up to the horrors a young woman suffered as a group of men raped her in a moving bus in Delhi. The inhumanity of the crime, her tragic death, and the fact that despite our collective anger and grief, the year has been dotted with violence of a gendered and sexual nature, should be enough to quell any celebrations. What happened to her and then to many other reported and invisible survivors of sexual violence in the country has seen a dramatic transformation of the digital public sphere.

Spurred by anger, frustration and the realisation that we are often the agents of change, people have taken to the streets and the information highway in unprecedented forms. Every reported incident of sexual violence — from the young intern who was molested by a former Supreme Court judge to the now infamous Tehelka case — sparked great ire on Twitter, Facebook, blogs and collaborative user-generated content sites. Hashtags have trended, videos have gone viral. Men and women have bonded together to speak against the increasingly unsafe spaces we seem to inhabit.

Responding to this public demonstration and outrage, we have seen some positive developments from the governments and judiciary systems which are morally, legally and constitutionally bound to look after us. And yet, we are quickly realising that much of this is not enough. While the law takes its course and tries to craft and enforce more efficient regulation to prevent and protect victims of such violent crimes, we have despaired at how it doesn't seem to change things materially.

The digital spaces that we have used to fight, to protest and to call for action, are also where we have shared the frustration at how little material reality has changed. Hashtags on Twitter have gone through life cycles of anger, protest and despair, as the complex structures of archaic laws, slow judiciary processes, prejudiced judges, and a populist politics which is often superficial, take their toll on processes to establish justice, equality and freedom for our societies.

As tweets and Facebook updates have now clearly told us, through testimonies and witness accounts, these questions cannot be understood in isolation. The social media has consistently reminded us that the December 16 gang rape was not just about one woman. It was about the misogynist societies that we are constructing and the fundamental flaws in systems which encourage the idea that men have ownership of the bodies and lives of women in our country. Across the year, through campaigns by online intervention groups like the Blank Noise Project or through note-card viral memes like "I need feminism" have emphasised the need to acknowledge these not as "women's problems" or "exceptional" problems. These are problems that need to be understood in the larger context of human rights, and our rights to life, dignity, equality and freedom enshrined in our Constitution.

And yet, as another year comes to an end, the social media is ablaze at a decision that has marked one of the darkest days in recent judicial history. On December 11, the Supreme Court of India repealed the landmark historical judgement issued by the Delhi High Court that read down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that criminalises same-sex relationships. Finding this in defiance of our constitutional rights, the well-weighed judgment was celebrated across social media — nationally and globally — for its recognition that the problem of discrimination is never just about one demography or section of the society. As the LGBTQ communities stood in shock, there was something else that happened on social media.

For once, the comments of disbelief, anger and surprise turned into a roar for correcting such a verdict. And it is not only the LGBTQ identified people and activists who are joining this clamour. Straight people, people with families, families with LGBTQ children, are all coming out and finding a common bond of solidarity that works around hashtags and viral sharing of messages. The world of social media has shown how we have learned, that we cannot leave the underprivileged to fight for themselves. Because, if we ignore the discrimination against them, we will have nobody to support us when we are being treated as sub-human and irrelevant in a country that has often done poetic interpretations of what constitutional rights mean.

I started writing this piece with despair. But I slowly realise that maybe there is something to be thankful about this year. That even when our archaic systems of justice are catching up with the accelerated transformations in our lives, the social media does act as a public space where those bound together in their belief for equality and justice can act in solidarity. On Twitter, this fateful day, everybody was queer. And they did not have to identify themselves as men or women, straight, gay or lesbian. Despite our bodies, our differences, our status and practices, we can claim to fight for those whose voices, bodies, lives and loves are being negated in our country. And if you cannot take to the streets to make your support felt, remember that the digital public sphere is active and buzzing. Those in power have no choice but to take into account the collective voice on the internet, which demands and shall build open, fair and equal societies.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/indian-express-december-22-2013-nishant-shah-digital-native

Digital Habits: How and Why We Tweet, Share and Like

nishant — 2012-10-23T10:13:36Z

There aren’t always rational explanations for the ways in which we behave on networks. While there are trend spotting sciences and pattern recognition methods which try to make sense of how and why we behave in these strange ways on networks, they generally fail to actually help us understand why we do the things that we do when we are connected.

Nishant Shah's column was originally published in FirstPost on October 12, 2012.

Recently, in a workshop on ‘Habits of Living’, organised by Brown University (USA) and the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore), a collection of researchers, artists, practitioners and educators came together to understand how networks form these habits that we take for granted in our digital lives.

Habits are unthinking, visceral actions that we do for survival within a network. They are things that we do without even realising that we are doing them – Liking a post, retweeting a tweet, sharing an interesting link, adding pictures on an album. These are all things we do without realising that they distract us from our work, need time, energy, and attention which we could have spent on other tasks. Instead of looking at these as actions which can be rationally explained, we might start looking at them as habits that shape the ways in which we trust, transmit and treasure information online.

Networks are everywhere these days. They are the things that we study and the lens through which we study the world around us. In the last week, I have faced three separate instances that reminded me of how we live in networked societies.

There was the scare that the private messages on facebook have suddenly turned public and available on our timelines for everybody to view. The social network, these simulated fortresses of friendships and trust, suddenly became a place of danger. Conversations which were committed as acts of secrecy emerged as potentially compromising public acts. The network was in my face, blinking red, making me suddenly aware of the fact that the network is not merely something I can take for granted. It is something that works seamlessly for most of the time, is actually something that I cope with, negotiate with, and teach myself to live with, without realising it. The relationship I have with my social network is a lot of work but it gets explained away as ‘habits’ , which are such an everyday part of my digital life that I have stopped looking at it as work.

The second incident was when a friend complained about the hostility she faces when she is not on any of the popular social networks. As an outsider, who refuses by choice, to belong to either Facebook or Google Plus or many of the activity networks (like Instagram, for instance) around, she constantly gets a raised eyebrow, a pointed question and a look of incredulity when she confesses it to somebody. More often than not, she gets treated like digital pariahs, social outcast who is no longer ‘relevant’ in the current scheme of things. She was telling me about how hard she has to work to convince people that she belongs to the communities, even though not to these networks. And how, she is constantly afraid that while she plugs out, people might be saying things about her that she might want to hear but never get to know.

The third is perhaps more common than we would agree to but it deals with multiple identities online. In the world of Wikipedia, there are people who use sock-puppets and meat-puppets, using multiple avatars and identities to make their point, to fake support for their arguments, and to build false consensus in order to win the edit wars that they are fighting. These puppets, that stand in as surrogate structures of real people, are not mere surface structures. They are fleshed out, have personalities, have styles and identities which the users invest in quite passionately. While the community frowns upon these false identities, and indeed social network platforms encourage us to shun all role-play and stick to our one authenticated social identity, these flourish and often gain a life of their own as a shadow double of the user. And yet, everybody knows that these identities are a matter of habits, a collection of ‘things that we do’ which emerge as important actors in the networks.

These habits might offer us an explanation of why we participate in memes, sharing and disseminating information virally across the interwebz. They might also give us an insight into why we troll and transmit viruses and spam, to friends in the networks, even when we do not mean to. They might help us understand why we are suffering from such an information fatigue, even when we have smart algorithms and softwares constantly sifting through the information web and filtering customised results for us.

The idea of the network as a series of habits opens up a new way to thinking about all the three instances, which I described above. It shows that the networks become invisible in our everyday practice, thus creating a condition of false crisis, because they are simultaneously transparent and opaque. It shows that networks are not ‘natural’ but take a lot of effort and energy to sustain – something that digital natives might take to easily but are not kind to digital immigrants, settlers or non-inhabitants, who cannot invest as much time in their networked lives, thus creating new demography of exclusion.

And it shows that the network, despite the much acclaimed wisdom of the crowds, can be easily manipulated by those who learn how to fake conditions of life and living within the simulated networked environments. And it would explain why, if I end this column by asking you to go to Google Images and search for “completely wrong”, partly out of curiosity, partly because of expectation, and partly because of habit, you will run the search strings anyway, in the process, supporting the network but also reinforcing your habits of information search and connections.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/first-post-tech-oct-12-2012-nishant-shah-digital-habits-how-and-why-we-tweet-share-and-like

Digital Gender: Theory, Methodology and Practice

nishant — 2014-04-07T04:07:27Z

Dr. Nishant Shah was a panelist at a workshop jointly organized by HUMlab and UCGS (Umeå Centre for Gender Studies) at Umeå University from March 12 to 14, 2014. He blogged about the conference.

Read the original published by HUMLAB Blog on March 20, 2014 here. Details of the workshop on Digital Gender can be seen here.

“When I was first invited to be a part of the Digital Gender conference curated by Anna Foka at the HUMlab in Umea, Sweden, there were many things that I had expected to find there: Historical approaches to understanding the relationship between digital technologies and practices and construction of gender, multi-modal and multi-disciplinary frameworks that examine the intersections of gender and the digital; Material and discursive descriptions of how we understand gender in contemporary realms. And indeed, I found it all there, and more, as a great collection of people, came together in dialogues of scholarly rigour, critical inquiry and political solidarity and empathy, to learn, to teach, to exchange research and scholarship. Given my past experiences of being at HUMlab and the incredible range of scholarship that was curated there, this came as no surprise.


Above: Dr. Nishant Shah in HUMlab

However, the one thing that stood out for me was an incredible session on Game Making conducted by Carl-Eric Engqvist. When I first saw it in the programme, I was apprehensive. What can Game Making have to do with digital gender? What would we learn from trying to design a game? I have been in ‘doing workshops’ before where things don’t always go as planned. Especially with the new ‘maker culture’ movements and DIY hipster phases, I have often found myself disappointed with workshops that focus too much on the technological and the interface. And I was in two minds about this – surely, we could have spent the time in more traditional academic experiences – round tables, discussion groups, or even just increased time for the participants to present their work. And so when the workshop began, I was waiting for it to make sense – to see what the game making’ workshop could have in store for the motley group of people that had assembled there.

Engqvist started off by showing us three games that have inspired him the most and what he wanted us to take as our points of thought and from that moment on, I knew we were in safe hands. Engqvist was not interested in games for gaming. He was interested in games as artefacts, as ways of thinking, as modes of engagement into exploring, reifying and concretizing many of the questions around power and empathy. And more than anything else, he presented with us the idea that games can be pedagogic, they can be learning tools; and though they might be designed for young players, they can be ways by which we translate our academic knowledge and research into practice.

What emerged in the subsequent two hours, was a great exercise in feminist methods and knowledge meeting new pedagogy and discussions. The group divided into two teams and set out to make a game that would be suitable for 8-10 year olds, and questions ideas of power and imbalance in their lives. Here are some things that I learned from the conversations:

The nature of true power: One of the most interesting discussions that emerged was where the power resides. Scripted games often give us the illusion of power by making the power of the script writer invisible. While games are often open to creative interpretation and negotiation, these are only within the context of the constraints of the game. How do we design games that are then transparent about their own limitations? Can we think of a game that is about building the game rather than playing a game? Can we think of game outside of structures of competition and winning, closer to the designs of the Theatre of the Oppressed?
Collective Empathy: The most dramatic revelation in the game making exercise was the engineering of empathy. There were many different suggestions on how to build empathy. One of the ideas was to put the players in simulations of real-life crises, asking them to take up different roles as antagonists and protagonists within the conflict, along with by-standers who can choose to be allies. However, drawing from legal narratives of rape, that demand that the rape victim be not subjected to re-living the experience through testimonies in court, we decided that it might be not fruitful to make participants re-live real-life trauma in the course of the game. Eventually, we decided that the way to escape this would be to let the participants be in control of their own simulations, and offer them ways of establishing trust and empathy.
The power of narratives: In designing the narrative of the game, what came out was our own personal narratives of why we believe in the things that we do. How do we devise a game that has narratives of the everyday that can eventually transcend into becoming special? How does the playing of the game itself lead to repeated narratives, each customised to the situation? How do we create conditions and infrastructure that encourages users to iterate, repeat, remix and remediate ideas so that they become rich and layered narratives? And most importantly, how do we take something that is traumatic or troublesome, something that scares or angers us, and get the help of our fellow players, to reappropriate it, diffuse its hostile edge, and make it more amenable and something that we can cope with?
DIY experiences: We recognised as a group, that we were more interested in a game that was about crafting experiences rather than designing learning goals. Or in other words, we wanted something so simple that it triggers something at the most visceral level, allowing the players to dig deeper into their own selves and come up with ideas that could resonate with the others. The ambition also was to have the gamers be in control of the intensity and thus define the parameters of their own gaming experience rather than be put into conditions or situations that might lead to further trauma.
Teaching versus Learning: The largest chunk of our discussions pivoted around these two concepts. When designing a pedagogic game, how do we locate ourselves and the players? Do we assume the role of pedagogues who have specific messages to deliver, or do we assume the role of co-learners who will build a set of rules that create new conditions of playing every time? How do we further ensure that the games will have a feminist pedagogy of recursive and self-reflexive criticality along with a clear message of empathy, collaboration and togetherness?


Presentation of the game ‘Drawing It Out’

What emerged through these five learning principles was a simple game that we called ‘Drawing It Out’. Here are the rules of the game, followed by some pictures that emerged as we played the game ourselves in the group.

Game: Drawing It Out.

Players: 3-6.

Age: 8 and above

Materials: A number dice, a dice with different emotion words written on it: Shame, Anger, Frustration, Love, Fear, Hope. A tea-timer of 3 minutes. Sheets of blank paper, different coloured pens and pencils.

Instructions:

Each member in the group rolls the number dice. The person with the highest roll gets to roll the emotion dice.
The emotion dice lands on any one of the emotions. For example: Fear.
The tea-timer is turned, and each player, sitting in a circle, gets three minutes to draw the one thing that they are afraid of.
When the time is over, each player gets to talk about the thing that they are afraid of.
Once everybody has explained their fear, they pass their sheet of paper to the person on the right. The tea-timer is turned. The next person draws something else on the sheet of paper – adding, remixing, morphing, changing the original drawing – to show how they can help in overcoming the particular fear. In the case of hopeful words like Love and Hope, the players add how they would increase and share in the feeling.
Each time the tea-timer runs out, the paper moves on to the next person in the circle. The process is repeated till the sheet of paper reaches the person who had first drawn on it.
At the end, each person looks at the sheet of paper they had begun with and the others talk about the ways in which they have added to the original drawing.
The participants roll the number dice again and repeat the process. Participants are not allowed to draw the same thing if the emotion is repeated. The game can be played till there is interest or time to play it.
The players get to take the sheets of remixed papers home with them as artefacts and signs of the trust established within the game.”

Dr. Nishant Shah is the co-founder and Director-Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India. He is also an International Tandem Partner at the Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University, Germany and a Knowledge Partner with the Hivos Knowledge Programme, The Netherlands. Recently Dr. Nishant Shah visited HUMlab to participate in the conference “Digital gender: Theory, Methodology and Practice” (http://www.humlab.umu.se/digitalgender).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-gender-theory-methodology-practice

Digital Futures: Internet Freedom and Millennials

nishant — 2012-02-15T04:25:50Z

Last year was a turbulent year for freedom of speech and online expression in India. Early in 2011 we saw the introduction of an Intermediaries Liability amendment to the existing Information Technologies Law in the country, which allowed intermediaries like internet service providers (ISPs), digital content platforms (like Facebook and Twitter) and other actors managing online content, to remove material that is deemed objectionable without routing it through a court of law. Effectively, this was an attempt at crowdsourcing censorship, where at the whim or fancy of any person who flags information as offensive, it could be removed from digital platforms, writes Nishant Shah in DMLcentral on 3 February 2012.

While we were still reeling from the potential abuse this could lead to – from weekend drunken games where people send take-down notices on an ad hoc basis to regressive fundamentalists using this to silence voices of protests – we encountered another shock. The Information and Technologies minister of India called some of the biggest social networking platforms that support user generated content to exercise a regime of self-regulation and censorship. Citing content that was considered slanderous to political leaders in the country and potentially offensive to the religious sentiments of certain groups, he called for a ‘pre-screening’ of online content – invoking visions of thought police, where an army of thousands will be trained to read your personal and private information, sift it for offensive content, and disallow it to be published online.

And while we deal with the aftermath of what this might mean to the future of openness and our constitutionally enshrined rights of freedom of speech and expression, there was another shock that awaited us in 2012. Even as I write this, Facebook and Google – two of the largest social media platforms in India – have been 'implicated' in a gamut of civil and criminal charges. It has been alleged that these companies knowingly allowed obscene and immoral material capable of inciting prurience, communal tension, hatred and violence, to proliferate in their systems because it helps generate revenue. Because the people who uploaded the information are outside the jurisdiction of the court, they cannot be punished but these intermediaries that have allowed this content that is deemed ‘obscene, lascivious, indecent and shocking’, are now being held responsible.

There has been a lot of debate in and outside the country about the implications this has for the form and nature of information online. Freedom of speech and expression, information regulation regimes in emerging information societies, resurgence of authoritative governmentality in the face of quickly eradicating sovereignty, and the diminishing openness of the web, have all been variously discussed, much like the debates around SOPA/PIPA discussions in the US. In all of these conversations, there has been talk about the future but not about the people whose futures are the most at stake – digital natives. Pulling from my research, here are some summarized reflections of members of a younger generation pondering their digital futures:

Innovation: One of the tropes that allows digital natives intimate relationships with their technology gadgets, platforms and environments is to innovate. Especially in the global south where we cannot take ubiquitous and affordable access to the internet for granted, innovation is not merely about creativity in producing new content. Innovation is in mobilizing meager resources in order to achieve large tasks. Innovation is in cutting through existing boundaries of inequity and building communities of learning and information. Innovation is in finding ways by which access can be facilitated for large user bases. Free and open information is the reward that follows innovation. There is consensus that restricting access to information is a negative incentive for those approaching the information superhighway. And for some it is also “a challenge to find ways of accessing that information. They can ban it, but by the time they will ban it, our way of accessing it will have changed!”

Information Read/Write: Sometimes the promise of digital networks providing abundant information and knowledge, which is free to access and consume, overrides the actual allure of speech and expression. As one interlocutor explained in Wikipedia terms, “more people access Wikipedia to consume information others have produced rather than contribute to it...and it is the same everywhere. It is fun to write, but it is fun to write only because there is somebody reading it. Sometimes I go online to read rather than write.” The censorship debates often restrict themselves to freedom of speech and expression, but what they overlook is that this also interferes with the freedom to read. Reading is a form of engagement, interaction, formation of trust and affection online. And when information can no longer be easily read, it will have drastic effects on how young people connect and form communities.

Mapping Learning: For many digital natives in my work, the digital domain is not only a playground but also a space of learning. Not learning in its didactic forms, replacing universities and offering abundance of knowledge. For some, the digital space is a new process of learning. It helps them negotiate and cope with their formal curricula and offers alternative sources to understand and analyze reality. As many in our research group mentioned, “we already have access to enough academic material through our libraries. What we find on the internet are things that help us understand ideas through things that are familiar to us.” When pressed for an example, I was shown a wide range of popular and academic, cultural and social spaces – blogs, videos, movies, music, commentaries, tweets, mashups, etc., which the students often map back to their existing curriculum. “Sometimes the textbooks talk about things that happened before we were born. Or belonging to countries we don’t know much about,” explained a 19-year-old. So as a group they try and pull different and more familiar objects back into their discussions, using the web, its search potential, and social networking sites as filters to gain access to relevant knowledge.

It is in the nature of information to be filtered or censored. Even at a personal level we constantly filter out information that is not desirable or useful to us. It is understandable that certain kinds of information that are produced with malicious intent needs to be controlled. However, the recent attempts attack the very structures that define the social web as we understand it now -- openness, distribution, sharing, collaboration, co-creation and interactivity. For digital natives, being digital is not just about infrastructure and access. It is an integral part of how they embed themselves and negotiate with our information society. Regulation of information is not just about resolving the crisis of the present but also about shaping the digital futures for a generation that is growing up digital.

Banner image credit: zebble http://www.flickr.com/photos/zebble/6080622/

Read the original published in DML Central

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/digital-futures-internet-freedom-and-millennials-2

Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?

nishant — 2015-04-10T09:22:29Z

Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society have consolidated their three year knowledge inquiry into the field of youth, technology and change in a four book collective “Digital AlterNatives with a cause?”. This collaboratively produced collective, edited by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen, asks critical and pertinent questions about theory and practice around 'digital revolutions' in a post MENA (Middle East - North Africa) world. It works with multiple vocabularies and frameworks and produces dialogues and conversations between digital natives, academic and research scholars, practitioners, development agencies and corporate structures to examine the nature and practice of digital natives in emerging contexts from the Global South.

Introduction

In the 21^st Century, we have witnessed the simultaneous growth of internet and digital technologies on the one hand, and political protests and mobilisation on the other. Processes of interpersonal relationships, social communication, economic expansion, political protocols and governmental mediation are undergoing a significant transition, across in the world, in developed and emerging Information and Knowledge societies.

The young are often seen as forerunners of these changes because of the pervasive and persistent presence of digital and online technologies in their lives. The “ Digital Natives with a Cause?” is a research inquiry that uncovers the ways in which young people in emerging ICT contexts make strategic use of technologies to bring about change in their immediate environments. Ranging from personal stories of transformation to efforts at collective change, it aims to identify knowledge gaps that existing scholarship, practice and popular discourse around an increasing usage, adoption and integration of digital technologies in processes of social and political change.

Methodology

In 2010-11, three workshops in Taiwan, South Africa and Chile, brought together around 80 people who identified themselves as Digital Natives from Asia, Africa and Latin America, to explore certain key questions that could provide new insight into Digital Natives research, policy and practice. The workshops were accompanied by a ‘Thinkathon’ – a multi-stakeholder summit that initiated conversations between Digital Natives, academic researchers, scholars, practitioners, educators, policy makers and corporate representatives to share learnings on new questions: Is one born digital or does one become a Digital Native? How do we understand our relationship with the idea of a Digital Native? How do Digital Natives redefine ‘change’ and how do they see themselves implementing it? What is the role that technologies play in defining civic action and social movements? What are the relationships that these technology based identities and practices have with existing social movements and political legacies? How do we build new frameworks of sustainable citizen action outside of institutionalisation?

Rationale

One of the knowledge gaps that this book tries to address is the lack of digital natives’ voices in the discourse around them. In the occasions that they are a part of the discourse, they are generally represented by other actors who define the frameworks and decide the issues which are important. Hence, more often than not, most books around digital natives concentrate on similar sounding areas and topics, which might not always resonate with the concerns that digital natives and other stake-holders might be engaged with in their material and discursive practice. The methodology of the workshops was designed keeping this in mind. Instead of asking the digital natives to give their opinion or recount a story about what we felt was important, we began by listening to their articulations about what was at stake for them as e-agents of change. As a result, the usual topics like piracy, privacy, cyber-bullying, sexting etc. which automatically map digital natives discourse, are conspicuously absent from this book. Their absence is not deliberate, but more symptomatic of how these themes that we presumed as important were not of immediate concerns to most of the participants in the workshop who are contributing to the book.

Structure

The conversations, research inquiries, reflections, discussions, interviews, and art practices are consolidated in this four part book which deviates from the mainstream imagination of the young people involved in processes of change. The alternative positions, defined by geo-politics, gender, sexuality, class, education, language, etc. find articulations from people who have been engaged in the practice and discourse of technology mediated change. Each part concentrates on one particular theme that helps bring coherence to a wide spectrum of style and content.

Book 1: To Be: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

The first part, To Be, looks at the questions of digital native identities. Are digital natives the same everywhere? What does it mean to call a certain population ‘Digital Natives”? Can we also look at people who are on the fringes – Digital Outcasts, for example? Is it possible to imagine technology-change relationships not only through questions of access and usage but also through personal investments and transformations? The contributions help chart the history, explain the contemporary and give ideas about what the future of technology mediated identities is going to be.

Book 2: To Think: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

In the second section, To Think, the contributors engage with new frameworks of understanding the processes, logistics, politics and mechanics of digital natives and causes. Giving fresh perspectives which draw from digital aesthetics, digital natives’ everyday practices, and their own research into the design and mechanics of technology mediated change, the contributors help us re-think the concepts, processes and structures that we have taken for granted. They also nuance the ways in which new frameworks to think about youth, technology and change can be evolved and how they provide new ways of sustaining digital natives and their causes.

Book 3: To Act: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

To Act is the third part that concentrates on stories from the ground. While it is important to conceptually engage with digital natives, it is also, necessary to connect it with the real life practices that are reshaping the world. Case-studies, reflections and experiences of people engaged in processes of change, provide a rich empirical data set which is further analysed to look at what it means to be a digital native in emerging information and technology contexts.

Book 4: To Connect : Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

The last section, To Connect, recognises the fact that digital natives do not operate in vacuum. It might be valuable to maintain the distinction between digital natives and immigrants, but this distinction does not mean that there are no relationships between them as actors of change. The section focuses on the digital native ecosystem to look at the complex assemblage of relationships that support and are amplified by these new processes of technologised change.

We see this book as entering into a dialogue with the growing discourse and practice in the field of youth, technology and change. The ambition is to look at the digital (alter)natives as located in the Global South and the potentials for social change and political participation that is embedded in their interactions through and with digital and internet technologies. We hope that the book furthers the idea of a context-based digital native identity and practice, which challenges the otherwise universalist understanding that seems to be the popular operative right now. We see this as the beginning of a knowledge inquiry, rather than an end, and hope that the contributions in the book will incite new discussions, invoke cross-sectorial and disciplinary debates, and consolidate knowledges about digital (alter)natives and how they work in the present to change our futures.

Click here to order your copy. We invite readers to contribute reviews of an essay they found particularly interesting. Contact us: nishant@cis-india.org and fjansen@hivos.nl if you want more information, resources, or dialogues

Nishant Shah

Fieke Jansen

For media coverage and book reviews, read here.

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

Defending the Humanities in the Digital Age

nishant — 2014-03-06T11:40:42Z

The author says that he is trying to take the formulation of digital humanities as a history-in-making where we might still be able to salvage the humanities from being soft-skills and our pedagogies from becoming reduced to MOOCs.

Dr. Nishant Shah's column was published in DML Central on February 24, 2014.

Taking Care of Things: Reclaiming What is Lost in Our Defence of Humanities[1]
If this were a book, this section would be the preface. If it were an academic paper, a footnote. If an art piece, a curator’s note. But, in this mixed multi-media semi-strange space of the research blog, this is just the space where I tell you what is going to follow. And perhaps, explain (though not to justify) why I need to tell you what is going to follow. For a while now, I have been trying to work through some of the questions that have emerged around (and sometimes, because of) digital humanities as a concept and as a practice. A lot of my thought has been about addressing the concerns around infrastructure, human skill, resources, pedagogy and the need to disprivilege the digital as the only point of focus in a majority of the discourse.

As I write about these questions in the different spaces that I write in, I’m trying to take the formulation of digital humanities as a history-in-making where we might still be able to salvage the humanities from being soft-skills and our pedagogies from becoming reduced to MOOCs. In doing so, I started experiencing a strange discomfort with my own writing. This is not new. Every time I glance retrospectively at my older writing, I cringe, and despair and work hard at resisting the impulse to apologise to my readers. It could have been better, sharper, more precise.[2]But, the discomfort that I am experiencing now, looking at the last couple of years of writing about digital humanities, is different. It is a discomfort that emerges from the fact that in trying to defend and protect the domain of the humanities, the register of my writing has changed considerably.

I try to be accessible and write in prosaic forms that are easily understood and not prone to ambiguity. I try to talk to multiple stakeholders, especially those who are ringing the death knell of traditional humanities, speaking in a language of relevance, significance, impact and efficacy. I try to build infrastructure, engaging with funding agencies, carefully extrapolating the ideas of pilot innovations, mainscaling, upstreaming and integrating everyday practices.

In all these attempts, which have been successful in varying degrees, I have let go of the very things that my English literature and humanities training had equipped me to do — to write with passion, to explore the creativity of linguistic and textual expression, to mix form, function and format to generate new relationships between disparate objects that might have otherwise been kept in their self-contained silos — and to pursue, not through empirical evidence, but through creative association, through cross-cultural and inter-textual referencing, a persuasive politics of passionate dialogue. Or, to not make such a song and dance (and a possible meme) out of it, I am slowly realising that very few of us, doing digital humanities, are exploring the very tools that humanities studies have offered us, to question and contest the status quo so that we can envision and dream alternate realities and futures.[3] So caught have we been, trying to defend our craft (and sometimes the art) that we have started speaking in the language of those who question, rather than strengthening the voices we already have.

So, I write today (see, I told you, we would need an explanation), as an experiment, in a language and style that I have forced myself to forget, in a way that I don’t even remember that it is forgotten. I write about three things – archives, life-cycles, and habits — in order to look at the complex and complicated relationships that we have presumed and established in the practices of digital humanities. I write to question our human-centric approach, where we think about things, but we only think of them from our human perspectives. I write to imagine, nay, to persuade you to imagine, what it would be like to think of things as things, dislodged from our human positions and dreaming cyborg dreams. I write, to explore, what it means in our DH concerns, to take care of things as things, and not as the separate, the other, the human.

Taking Care of Things: The Beginning

Welcome, human beings, cyborgs, and things, to this blog post[4] It has been designed, by a few human beings, by a few machines, and a few things in-between. Here, I lay the ground and lead you into the fine practice of taking care of things. But this task produces in me a strange existential anxiety. I try to figure out what role I play in introducing something as common place, quotidian and everything as taking care of things.

Should I be like the head of an organised crime unit, who, for a price, shall take care of things that bother you by destroying them, silencing them, or making them invisible? Maybe I channel the energies of a grandmother, looking down the family tree of resemblances, giving out instructions on how to take care of the legacies and heirlooms, of the epilepsies in blood, that we shall pass from generation to generation. Should I be a historian who identifies patterns in the order of things, giving you hints at how we need to take care of things past and things to come so that we can live with things as they are? Or, how about a witness, blindfolded in my ignorance, a heathen in his blindness, describing to you the wonders of an elephant that looks like a pillar, a rope, a pan and a sword, trying to preserve what I remember, always knowing, always despairing that what I recall is smaller than what I remember, what I remember is smaller than what I know, what I know is smaller than what is, and what is, is both inscrutable and ineffable by the mere human?

As I negotiate with these fractured, fragmented, frail and failed attempts at trying to care for you, care for ideas, care enough to transmit thoughts via words into your receptive selves, I realise that it is a futile attempt. Even if I were to enter that state of information nirvana, where what I think translates into words, pristine, pure, uncontaminated by powers of interpretation and untouched by the fallacy of meaning, you still would be unable to process it. Everything that I say will only be misunderstood by you. And, I shall misread your misunderstanding. And, together we shall fake it, like orgasms on a surreptitious one-night stand, in the quest of making meaning. In other words, I lament that we are not machines. That we are not things. It is only in the machinistic, especially in the digital machines of computing, that these seamless flows of information are possible. Garbage in, garbage out. What you see is what you get. Does exactly what it says on the tin. All your base are belong to us.

And so, welcome, once again human beings, cyborgs, things to this piece of text that I hope turns out to be fantastic, terrific, awesome. Fantastic because it invites you to enter realms of fantasy. Terrific because it leads us into things that terrify us. To this awesome evening. Awesome because it silences us into awe. Welcome, to this text, which is a safe space — look, you can ride on the hyphen, or drop between the white spaces of words. It is a safe space where we think, not of things, but as things. That is the only way out of the quandary into which I have trapped myself.

Taking Care of Things
It is humanly impossible to do so. And it is in thinking of taking care as a human function, that we face bewilderment and anxiety. If we pretend, for the space of this text[5] to be things — immortal but destructible, without agency but with design, bereft of intention but with defined purpose, devoid of ambiguity but prone to abuse — and try and make sense of the three things that we shall return to, recursively, obsessively, desperately, in the next three days, then we might be on to something.

As things, we look at archives. The repository of things. An indexicality of things that are present. A glaring array of things that are absent. The archive has been imagined in the service of the human, at the desire of the human, and the curatorial logics of collective human experience too long. Let us think of not only an archive of things, but an archive that follows the internal logics and logistics of things. An archive that is constructed by things, which might sometimes give us human access and interface to things within it. Archives, which might use human powers — biological, organic, intellectual, affective — to organise themselves, to fuel their constant expansion and arrangement. Archives as a purpose for human existence. Archives as the alien space jelly that feeds on the human in order to survive, so that it can sustain the order and power of the things that reside within it.

In a world where the human has already conceded its right to memory — memory is a stick, it is a promiscuous, adulterous, plug and play flash drive, that romances, serenades and has infectious relationships with different machines… in such a world, it should be easy to imagine that the human, at least when it comes to informational realities, is secondary, if not insignificant. The human, prone to decay and death, attacked by biological malware that erodes its internal functions, disabling its programmes and often short-circuiting its motherboard, is fragile and surely the most unstable form of storing something as beautiful and terrifying as information.

We live too fast, die too soon, and in the process, constantly destroy the meaningless but necessary flow and circulation of information. And, so, we need to think of life-cycles differently. The things that we live with, generally outlive our carbon based biological bodies. We pass on, through genetic mutation, our eyes, our knobby knees and our genetic predisposition to chocolate to the subsequent generations. But, we also pass on our assets, our properties, our passwords and datasets. And maybe, given that the data outlives us, data is seemingly immortal, data registers our death and continues in its divine existence, we need to restructure our idea of who lives, who dies, and what constitutes a life-cycle.

Hence, I beseech you, to let go of your humanity. This stubborn sticking to the idea of being human, is merely a habit. It is taught. It is a form of co-option. Remember those days, when you were still not sure about being human. The day, when you were told that when you grow up, you can become anything you want — the disappointment of realising that it was a lie… that you wanted to be a dog, but you were trapped and coerced into becoming a human. Let go of the idea that being human has anything exceptional to it. We love. We care. We kill. Well, guess what?

Things Care
Things love. Oh, they love. Selfishly, destructively, intensely. Things love us and they demand our attention, time and intimacy, slowly enveloping us in soft glows, gently vibrating in our pockets, sensually slithering in our hands. And everybody knows what happens to a machine that you pour a cup of coffee on — like a disappointed lover, Romeo to his Juliet poisoning himself to death, like Medea on a revenge spree eating her own children, the machine, when neglected, dies.

Things care. But we are mistaken in thinking that they care for us. Things care for themselves. Things take care of each other. When you and I are asleep, your refrigerator connects to your microwave, speaking through the analogue networks, resonating in electromagnetic frequencies. And things kill. Slowly, gently, hypnotically, they wait, they watch, and when we are not looking, they stab, they sting, they betray and remind us that the human is futile.

To take care of things as human beings is then an exercise in wasted effort. Because we shall always be addressing things from a condition of inadequacy and wastefulness, well aware that the thing that we are talking to, talking about, talking through, is more precise, more fulfilled, more in control of its intentions and more aware of its destiny than we are ever going to be. Maybe in order to take care of things, we need to think of ourselves as things. Things that talk to things. Things that take care of things. That will be a world of new equalities. A world, where we can stop living in fear of the other — the thing.

Where Everything is a Thing
A thing is in everything.

[1]. This is a footnote to acknowledge that the first thought for this line of thinking emerged in conversations at the Post Media Lab, and concretized at their recent event from where I borrow this title. Special thanks for Oliver Lerone Schultz, Clemens Apprich, Christina Kral, Kelly Dobson and Wendy Chun who made this line of thinking grow through the Habits of Living workshops.

[2]. For the first time, the green underline that my word processor has produced, telling me that the correct prose would end the sentence with ‘and more precise’ is not feeding my Dysgrammatophobia. How dare it tell me how I should write?

[3]. I have to give a special shout out to Johanna Drucker whose resolute mixing of the styles and genres, writing as a digital humanist while writing about digital humanities has been truly inspiring.

[4]. I am not sure which of you would read it in its entirety, and I don’t really know how to talk to things yet, so while I welcome everybody and everything, I am going to address only the human reader in my text. My metadata, I hope, imparts pleasure to the non-humans who are not plotting their way into Actor-Network visualisations.

[5]. While battles rage on Twitter, relationships live their life-cycles on Facebook, new memes propagate and abound the Tumblrs, blink-and-you-miss-them, subcultural practices explode into meteoric showers, and somewhere, some harassed teacher tries to figure out what s/he did wrong in the last seven births that s/he now has to teach using Blackboard.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/dmlcentral-nishant-shah-february-24-2014-defending-the-humanities-in-the-digital-age

Deconstructing Digital Natives: Young People, Technology and the New Literacies

nishant — 2015-04-24T11:51:06Z

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.

Deconstructing Digital Natives: Young People, Technology and the New Literacies 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.

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.

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 . . . has affected the outlook of an entire age cohort in advanced economies” and instead should unpack how “new technologies emerging with this generation have particular characteristics that afford certain types of social engagement” (p.42).

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.

Takahashi’s essay on the oyaubibunka (“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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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).

Palfrey and Gasser, whose Born Digital (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.

Deconstructing Digital Natives 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.

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.

References

Bearne, E., Clark, C., Johnson, A., Manford, P., Motteram, M., & Wolsencroft, H. (2007). Reading on screen. Leicester: UKLA.
Marsh, J., Brookes, G., Hughes, J., Ritchie, L, Roberts, S., & Wright, K. (2005). Digital beginnings: Young children’s use of popular culture, media and new technologies. Sheffield: Literacy Research Centre, University of Sheffield.
Palfrey, J., & Gasser, U. (2008). Born digital. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Turkle, S. (2011). Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other, NY. New York: Basic Books.
Vaidhyanthan, S. (2011). The Googlization of everything: (And why we should worry). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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 http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook. Correspondence to: Nishant Shah, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India. E-mail: nishant@cis-india.org

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